#625 - Off-Platform & Amazon PPC Strategies
27:50 Share

In this week's episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we have expert Destiny with Sean with us, and she's answering all of your questions. And we're going to be talking a little bit about Black Friday and Cyber Monday and how one of her clients actually went from 200,000 to 4 million this holiday season. This and so much more on today's episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

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. Well, 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 this episode is our monthly live Tacos Tuesday show, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon and Walmart, PPC and advertising related with different guests. And today's host is going to be Kerry Miller. So, Kerry, take it away.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Tacos Tuesday. We have our expert guest here, Destiny Michon. Thanks so much for joining us, Destiny. Happy to be here. Very excited. I mean, the chaos of the holidays, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, what better time to get all your questions in? Yeah, exactly. On our end, almost across the board, we saw Amazon's extending this holiday period, you know,

taking some pressure off of their shipping for two days. So for the first time ever, if we're just comparing Black Friday to Black Friday year over year, this Black Friday was a little bit lower, but the overall holiday period was up. I don't know if consumer sentiment around shopping is higher, but sales were almost incredible. And I would say our ROAS was pretty in line. We had one brand go from 200,000 to 4 million in sales month over month.

Like it's obviously a giftable item, but it was pretty crazy to see that. So it's, it's been really strong now. Oh, that's amazing. And it run deals whatsoever. You did nothing for lead in like CPCs are up and your sales weren't that much stronger, but for the brands who leaned in, they did fantastic. Very. That's amazing. Was there a specific strategy you think that they changed? Cause that's a pretty substantial jump. They did a fantastic job in that. This is kind of the new topic I've been coining in my training is,

when you list on Amazon, you're just capturing the demand. Amazon's doing all the work. They're driving the people that are searching for your product. You're just, you know, you got a little bucket and you're capturing it. Yeah. What they did incredible was they created their own demand. So they went off platform. They invested in TV,

and video and they educated their customer base on why they need to buy their product. So when Black Friday, Sabra Monday came along and they typed in their search term, they stood out in the page because the customers were already familiar with their products. Wow, that's pretty incredible. Yeah, it was insane to watch. I've been curious about the TV ads and how, you know...

how those are going for people. So that's... Sounds like they... You can do a really good job with them. 100%. We're seeing a lot of success. It's also just like rewiring your brain. I think a lot of brands are spoiled because sponsored products are so successful. But I'm like, of course they're successful. A customer is already planning on buying. You didn't do any work. You just...

fit on a keyword like amazon did the work of bringing people on the platform very true so would you like to get on and start answering some of the questions from the audience let's do it i mean typically these run over so we might as well start strong well yeah okay this is from spencer and he says what is considered best practice for branded sponsored product campaigns do you make a separate campaign for each skew or do you make one campaign and put all the skews in it

It kind of depends. Your branded searches aren't always the same, right? If someone's typing in Coca-Cola Diet Coke versus regular Coca-Cola, you can change your strategy. So we segment based off search intents. We almost always separate branded versus non-branded. Like that is table stakes. You have to separate branded versus non-branded campaigns. But when it comes to lining up your SKUs, we depend on search intent. But also from a reporting perspective, it's sometimes nice to break out into single SKU campaigns because

Because then you can look at your tacos per brand and you can say, SKU A is doing really well. Maybe I should increase my branded search investment on this SKU and increase my budget on that campaign while pulling back on my branded investment for SKU number two.

Breaking out into single SKU campaigns as a whole just makes it really easy to control your budget distribution if you have good naming and good organized campaign structure. Daniel says, afternoon, is there a... I think it's morning for me, but afternoon probably for you guys. Is there a golden ratio of CTR to CVR for measuring effectiveness of ad campaigns? I'm not going to give...

I'm not going to give a golden ratio per se, because it's really dependent on category. Click through rate's also really difficult because it depends on things like pricing and reviews. So your advertising is going to be influenced by that. Same for your conversion rate. But your conversion rate, you can figure out what your category is converting on really easy using tools in Atomic or using the search query performance report.

And clearly see using brand metrics, hey, my category is converting at 20%. You should be converting better than category average. Like that's kind of the standard. If you're going to increase your ad investment, you need to be converting better than category average. That being said, again, it's also dependent on search intent. Probiotics is going to be a lot more expensive than probiotics for kids back to school, right? So you can't just blanket look at your conversion rate across the board. You have to understand intent. Awesome. Okay. Okay.

Let's go to Joshua. He says, if you came to Helium 10 from an agency and had hundreds of their old campaigns in your account, what is the best practice? Should I delete all of the non-performing campaigns and start over? I am not sure how to proceed. Great question. Like no matter what software you're transitioning to or an agency you're transitioning to, we don't ever recommend just pausing everything, you know,

hard stop. It's really bad for relevancy and it's difficult for the transition. What we do recommend doing is pulling your search term report for the last 60 days, pull out all of your keywords that are successful and build them out into the new structure that you want to move forward with using the new software.

And then slowly rolling those out at the same time. As your new campaigns pick up traction, you can slowly pause out your old campaigns that are maybe a bad structure or maybe they're a weird single keyword structure that you don't want to move forward with. You slowly transition them over. Like first thing, pull all your good keywords. Second thing, pause all your bad keywords. Third thing, slowly launch and transition your budgets over from old to new. What are the best practices for 2025 for new product launches? What's changed? I think, I mean, I don't know if that's in regards to, but that's what I would put it as. Yeah.

Yeah, I think quite a few things have changed. In terms of product launches, I would say driving external traffic is still doing really, really well and something that I think needs to be leaned into. A lot of brands cannot afford the CPCs in the category on a product that has zero reviews.

So any way you can use external traffic that's maybe a bit cheaper to get your reviews up before leaning really heavy into Amazon advertising is a little bit more profitable. I would also say we're seeing this transition to creative matters so much more. So making sure your click rate and conversion rate's good with your main image, but on the Amazon advertising side, really focusing on your sponsor brands, your sponsor brands video, your headline search ads,

Anything that makes you stand out on the page because when you're launching, you don't stand out on the review perspective. So find unique ways to stand out within the search results. My product launched in October and I'm struggling to get sales. I've been using auto and manual campaign spending between 30 to 50 per day on a $20 product. I've launched the product in another territory where it's selling well. So feel confident with the product and listing any suggestions.

Yeah. So I would say the first thing is to look at the keywords and really make sure they're the right keywords. Type them into Amazon. Do you see similar products? Once you see similar products, are those products priced at the same as you or are they cheaper than you? Do those products have a lot more reviews than you? Figure out the competitive advantage that they may have over you and improve your listing in that way.

On the advertising side, it's really as simple as, again, looking at the keywords and trying to expand the keywords in which you have that competitive advantage and then optimizing your bids to make sure you can be profitable. The biggest thing, though, I would say is understanding that competitive advantage. When you type in your main keyword, what do your competitors look like? What's the price? What's the reviews? Is the main image different? And the next question is from an elite member of ours. Hi, Andrew. Hi.

For SP product collection campaigns, we find basically all our sales come from top of search. Is that common? Also, is it worth spending time bidding on other placements for those campaigns? Great question. In general, I would say it is common. If you think about how the search results are set up on desktop and mobile, what is the biggest ad on the page? It's the sponsored brand top of search ad.

The headline ads, the sponsor brand ads on the product detail page are typically video. It's not typically product collection. It's sometimes store spotlight and video.

The only other sponsor brands that show up on page one are way down in the middle of search, sometimes the bottom of search. So this is very typical, not surprising. You can bid on the other placements. It's not going to drive a huge difference. Just know that the majority of your traffic and visibility comes from top of search because that's where all of the customers are clicking and viewing before they scroll down the page. All right.

The next one is from Keith. He says, "My BSR is improving and my PPC is converting. However, the organic ranking for my main keywords are not improving much. Any advice on how to improve rank?"

Yeah, the two biggest factors that you can then break down is sales velocity or conversion rate. So again, figure out your category conversion rate. That's super easy with brand metrics, insights and planning or Helium 10 Atomic. It's Amazon given data. It's first party data. So look at brand metrics. If you're converting lower than your category, you're going to need to drive a lot more traffic to your category. So you're probably going to need to spend more in order to improve that organic rank. On the flip side, let's say that...

you are spending more than the category or driving more in the category, then it comes down to again, like improving that conversion rate. It's traffic or conversion. Those are the two levers you really need to consider. So again, traffic, the easiest thing to do is spend more. It's not always the best answer or improve your listing and convert better. So that way you can easily spend a little bit more. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or as we say, indexed for that keyword.

Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker.

Hello, 80 to 90% of my PPC campaigns coming from SPV. I see the CPC and SPV a lot lower than sponsored. I am thinking to double down on, I'm assuming that's sponsored brand video and let the SP, uh, sponsored on the second plan. Would that be a good way of going? This is, I'm not going to say this is wrong, but this is really, really unusual to see because on page one, there's one sponsor brand video ad. So, um,

it's very limited in terms of advertising inventory. On page one, there's 15 to 20 different sponsored product camp placements. So almost actually across the board as an agency with over $100 million in spend, 70% of sales almost always come from sponsored products because they have more real estate and inventory on the page than anything else.

Very unusual. Also, sponsored brands can get competitive really fast because since there's only one placement on page one, when everyone starts increasing bids for that placement, you can kind of lose control as CPCs go up and you're going to lose a lot of your sales velocity.

So I love sponsored brands video. It's a great format, but it's very, very limited in terms of advertising inventory. And you should be investing more in sponsored products. That is across the board, the highest sales driving tactic because there's so many more sponsored product placements than anything else. Keith says or asks, what is the best way to check my conversion rate versus competitors on keywords?

I would say your search query performance report is probably like one of the easiest ways as a whole to look at search query performance. It's not specifically related to advertising. When you're specifically looking at advertising, you can't compare directly on the keyword level. You can look at it at the subcategory level, but you cannot see directly on the keyword level. You have to use SQP and then overlay it with the rest of your data. How can you measure the effects of

of having a loss leader to help bring in additional traffic into your brand or variation listing? Great question. I would probably dive into AMC for a lot of that. AMC is going to help you understand if someone clicks on one product, do they then end up buying another product? That's the

easiest way. Without that, you could probably use depending on where you're advertising the sponsored product to advertise product report to see if people are clicking on one and then buying another. That's a really easy way to justify. It's just limited to only your advertising data where if you use the appropriate AMC report, then you're going to be able to see all of your organic data and that's going to help you understand much better. My sponsor campaigns are doing well when I have a lower bid. Whenever I raise my bid to try and get more juice out of them, my budget gets blown and they become unprofitable. Do you know what I should do in order to make this work for me?

There's really no perfect answer here. I mean, this right here is the balance that is Amazon advertising. One of the things that we do to help this is we'll create two campaigns with the same keywords. One of our campaign will be lower bid focused on profitability and the other campaign will be higher bid with focus on sales. And we'll shift our budget back and forth. You know, 70% of our budget is going to go to profitability. 30% of our budget is going to go to the high traffic.

That way we're not having to constantly fluctuate our bids. This kind of allows us to move the budget from both to, you know, maximize profitability. And then when we're done with that, it's okay, we can shift more and turn on higher sales. It's just easier budget distribution. The other things that you could look at is, you know,

your bid management strategy, maybe there's a better middle ground. Are you optimizing for placements? Are you moving broad phrase and exact? Sometimes your long tail keywords are going to be a little bit cheaper from a CPC perspective. So you're going to be able to drive more profitability from your long tail keywords. All of those additional measures are going to be hugely beneficial for the strategy. The next question is, what's your take on DSP and data from AMC?

I'm going to start with data from AMC because it is now available for everyone. Brian Lee asked later on in the chat who can use AMC. Helium 10 has actually rolled it out. So you first need to request your instance being set up, but you do not need to run DSP ads to get access to AMC now. AMC is basically analytics and audience platform that just gives you a ton of insights into your Amazon advertising data.

If you're not incredibly familiar with Amazon ads, it's going to be probably a shiny object syndrome and I don't recommend you dive into it just yet. But if you understand sponsor brands and sponsored display. The second part of this question is what's my take on DSP? DSP has a bad reputation.

bad reputation in the space because agencies and or Amazon managed services haven't been running it well. But DSP as a tool is incredible. It's one of the most powerful Amazon advertising tools out there, I would say, if used appropriately. You do need to be spending at least $10,000 on DSP a month for it to make sense. But DSP is incredibly, incredibly powerful for brands that are ready for it. What do you recommend for ad campaigns when you have separate listing variations? Do you recommend to merge or manage in each campaign?

I again, it depends on search intent, in my opinion, if I have a black t shirt versus a red t shirt, and that's how they're variated, I like to separate out my campaign so I can create search terms based off the variations. If my only variation difference is size, no, not size price, $20 variation, $10 variation, I may not segment them, I would typically put my lowest price first, because that's going to have the highest click through rate and then lead customers to my other variations.

If it's flavor variations, weight variation, something with different search intent, I recommend segmenting campaigns so you can curate your keyword experience. What is a good way to determine keywords that you are ranking for then comparing them to PPC campaigns to determine which keywords you may not be advertising for? Any quick way to do this? Quick way is the fun part of this question.

So the biggest thing I would say is to a hundred percent, 80, 28. We kind of look at if we're ranked in the top four, we're going to pull back on sponsor product spend and move budgets to our sponsor brand. So we're winning the top of search and showcasing our brand. That's our overall strategy.

You can use tacos correlation to do this. If you have a tacos objective, you'll see that when you spend on a sponsored product ad that you're ranked for, your tacos is going to increase because you're cannibalizing your organic sales. So you can almost use tacos as a lever to push and pull. It's not a perfect solution, but it will help. The second thing to do would be to dive into using helium 10 and on a monthly quarterly basis, pulling probably those terms that on average you're above,

number four, number eight on. And then we create segmented campaigns for ranking that we can turn on and off as needed. So I don't want to turn off that keyword as a whole. I just want to lower the bids. So I'll shift my budget for my ranking campaigns to my profitability campaign. So I'm still running, but I'm not showing up in the top four sponsored ad placements. Jason says, what is an optimal amount of keywords per exact campaign? I started with 15 or so, but as keyword harvesting creates new targets, the list has grown quite a bit. Break them into new campaigns question. Absolutely.

Absolutely. I personally don't love harvesting new keywords into an old campaign because it's going to change the performance of your old campaign, right? If you have 10 new keywords that aren't proven, then your overall campaign may start performing worse. So 15 is a great number.

This is one of those fun, like depending on what influencer you follow in the space, you're going to get a different number. It's really depending on your budget. You know, we've had brands that are spending a million dollars a month and they're able to have 100 keywords in a campaign because their campaigns had a thousand dollar budget. So we could afford from a budget perspective to drive traffic to every keyword. If you don't have that budget and you're only at a hundred dollars a month or a day, then you're going to need a lot smaller group of keywords to make sure you're collecting data on those keywords.

So start with 15, maybe go to 20 to 30, depending on how high you want your budget to be, but then always break them out into new campaigns past that point. - Are exact keywords generally expensive than broad? What, according to you, is the right mix of keywords, match type within a campaign, and how many can, should be added? - This is a fun one. There's a ton of misconceptions around this, in my opinion.

It just depends because it's an auction model. If someone is bidding more on their exact match term than they are their phrase match, then maybe your exact match keywords are more expensive because your competitor is bidding more. We test all three match types across the board. They all three run in a very similar ACOS or ROAS because we control the bids to what's converting best at that certain point in time.

I think for us, phrase match is one of our highest selling match types right now because broad sometimes goes too broad and doesn't convert as well. Exact match typically converts the best but can be the most expensive if we're in a category where our competitors are bidding a lot more on exact match.

Highly recommend running all three. Later on, someone asks, you know, can you put them all in the same campaign? You can. It's not necessarily going to hurt. We break ours up most of the time. There's instances where we won't just so I can, you know, control again where my budget's going. But we continue to test every single keyword and every single match type and then just negate and or polymorph.

pause or lower bids depending on the performance in the CBCs. I recently launched about two weeks ago. I'm running an automatic and manual campaign. Is there any other campaigns I should be running? I would say that's fine unless you have a really high budget and look at maybe video or sponsored brands. Those are going to do really well for you. It's unique advertising inventory.

But considering it's only been two weeks, I think an auto and a manual is good. An auto is going to be used for keyword research and data collection for you. Use your manual campaign to really control where your traffic's going and then just continue adding those automatic keywords you're finding into your manual campaign.

Mike says, I'm in a category where there's a lot of window shopping. So my advertising spend is high as lots of clicks, no and low sales. Long tail keywords have low traffic and the keywords with higher search volume are very general, expensive and saturated by competitors. Any other strategies to consider? Yeah, I would say like the home decor, apparel, puzzles, those categories can be really difficult because of the window shopping. So you got to think, how do you stop someone from window shopping?

video does really, really well because then you're educating them on why your product's better and why they're interested. And the good thing with sponsor brands video is if they're just watching the video, you don't get charged. You only get charged if they clicked. And if they click, they're interested. But again, I'd put this back on you to ask, why are people clicking on your listing but not buying? Like even in high window shopping categories, you need to have a competitive advantage. The second thing I would say is product targeting. Sponsor product targeting, sponsor display product targeting can do really well.

Target all of the competitors who have lower reviews than you, a higher price point than you, worse reviews than you. These do really well in window shopping categories because as you mentioned, people are looking at competitors and then clicking on other listings and other listings. So this is a good opportunity to kind of take advantage of that mentality. Would you also say influencers are probably really the best way for those particular categories? Yeah, I think influencers do really well because they're again, it's the same as the video concept.

You don't want to just capture the demand to be compared to every other product in your category by price or reviews, which is what Amazon's know for. How do you educate a customer on why they need your product before they even click? Influencers, video ads, off-platform traffic does that job. Do you think Amazon rewards or gives more ranked use for organic sales more than PPC sales, or do they treat them the same? I would probably say more to organic sales. This is why...

your big retail brands, your Johnson and Johnson's, your Pepsi or Coke's can get away with having listings that maybe aren't as fantastic because their organic conversion rates so much higher, right? Even before they were spending a ton, like seven years ago when I got started in this space, those brands did so well because their conversion rate was higher. Customers were searching for their brand name and buying, right? So their organic is already inflated and doing much better. Nowadays, PPC, of course, plays a role, but

Amazon knows that they're going to max out on how much PPC opportunity they can have within the search results. So I think organic is weighted a little bit heavier in terms of conversion rate and click-through rate. Do you ever increase budget on a PPC campaign even if it isn't maxing out? It doesn't hurt. I don't think it necessarily helps. It can.

I've seen a few people kind of make statements like I ran a campaign at $50 a day budget and it did nothing. When I increased it to $500 a day, it did something. I've never really seen that, but it doesn't hurt anything. Joshua says, wait, so I thought it was best practice to segment campaigns as in keywords and such to determine the performance. So is it best practice to clump keywords together for campaigns in groups of 10 to 15? It doesn't really matter.

Matter. Single keyword campaigns are okay. They don't hurt, but they're a pain to scale. Like we have brands that have 500 keywords doing well. So I'm not going to create 500 campaigns when it doesn't drive that much added value. We do 10 to 15 because it's controllable. It's easy to scale. It's easy for us to build out.

In an absolutely perfect world, single keyword campaigns could be the best solution, the most value added because you can do your placements at the same time, but they're not scalable for most people. Most people don't have the operations to run it appropriately. And the softwares out there that are recommending single keyword campaigns have a really terrible bid management strategy that doesn't make sense for them.

So I would say if you're a small brand, only have one product, go ahead and run single keyword campaigns if you want. Just make sure you have a good system for naming and structuring. This is a good question. If you're new to Helium 10 and Atomic, what's the best place to start? I feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the system.

I would start by saying that that is the nature of Amazon and Amazon advertising in general. Like if you log into Ad Console, you're probably going to feel overwhelmed. So the biggest thing is to actually go through like the videos that are directly within Ad Atomic. Like that's...

what I would say one of your best bets and start learning each piece individually. That's something that I kind of got overwhelmed with. Like in the beginning, keyword research and bid management, that should be your core focus when it comes to advertising. So go through those segmented videos and help yourself understand the system that way. Do you have anything else, Carrie? Yeah, I mean, we do have kind of a PPC Academy. That's if you are a paid subscriber to Healington, you can go into that course. But Bradley also has done some,

He did some masterclasses on Atomic and then there's also kind of learn videos like you were saying, just like watch those little videos for each different thing within the actual tools. There's kind of little training videos. I would, I would suggest doing that. We also have it in our Academy. We have videos in our Academy that show you how to, um,

how to use Atomic. General, it just takes time and to not get overwhelmed. You have to hop in and you have to test and learn. By the time you learn something, Amazon will change some button or some switch. So don't get overwhelmed by like, we have incredible comments and questions that are being asked that I would say are pretty advanced here. So don't get overwhelmed by all of that. Just start simple, start small, and you'll figure it out as you go. I think we'll do maybe one more here. I think this...

Hopefully this is a good one. I use Cerebro to extract keywords from competitors' ASINs and then include those as exact and phrase match within the same campaign. As a result, my campaign sometimes ends up with 500 plus keywords. Is this approach okay or should I create smaller, more segmented campaigns? I'm going to assume what's happening with your 500 plus keywords is only 10 of them are actually getting impressions and clicks. That is the problem with that strategy. Unless you have a $1,000 a day budget...

you cannot afford the data across all those keywords. And what I mean by that is the industry standard is you need anywhere from 10 to 20 clicks per keyword before knowing whether or not it's a keyword that can be optimized, right? So let's say 10 clicks at a $1 bid.

across 500 keywords. I can't do that math. What is 500 times $10? Like 5,000? Yeah. Please, you guys, I just got the zeros. This is one of those memes. I was like, what is the most embarrassing thing you typed into your Amazon or your calculator this year?

All of that to say, you cannot afford to collect data on all those keywords. You're going way too big. And you're going to have campaigns that only have five to 10 keywords getting clicks because that's where all of your budget's going. Your budget's only going to go to those keywords. Amazon's not going to spread it across all of your keywords. So there's no point in doing any of that keyword research when 480 of those keywords you cannot afford to get impressions on. That is why we break them out in a segmented campaign so I can have a $10 campaign that

focus on one to two keywords collecting data. I can turn on and off as my keywords are successful versus your 500. Again, you can't necessarily afford it unless you're going to be spending five to $10,000 to collect data on all of those terms. All right. I think that's the last question. I think you've done an amazing job for pretty much 45 minutes straight answering questions. So thank you. And Andrew says, destiny is the goat. And then

uh, Corey said, agreed. This is awesome. So thank you so much for joining us for tacos Tuesday. And thank you to everyone in the audience. We had lots of, I mean, we still have questions we haven't answered. I'm sorry about that. We just don't have a time to do all of them every single time. But if you join next time early, you can get your questions in early, right when we start and get them answered. But thanks again for everyone who joined and also testing. If anyone wants to reach you, where can they reach you?

Facebook or LinkedIn is probably the easiest. I see a few like good questions that came in last minute. Corey Benson, like all of my content is pretty much on LinkedIn based around your question. So feel free to follow me on either of those platforms or reach out in the Helium 10 groups. I'm pretty active in those groups. So if you have any questions that we missed, we'd love to hop in and help. Yeah. If you're not following Destiny on LinkedIn, you're missing out. So you got to go, go follow her there. So, all right. Thank you again. And we'll see you all again next time on Tacos Tuesday.