#650 - Launching New Products with Amazon Ads
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Today we talk the basics of getting your listing prepared and the strategies to launch that listing in Amazon advertising with the help of expert destiny. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host Bradley Sutton and this is the show that is our monthly Tacos Tuesday where we go deep into anything and everything Amazon advertising. Now usually we have tons and tons of Q&A but on this one we actually prepared a special kind of presentation here at the Helium 10 office.

And it was, first of all, before you even get to advertise your product, you've got to get it what we call retail ready. The first half of this is going to be about how do you get your listing retail ready? How do you make sure you are indexed for the right keywords that could potentially bring you sales that you'd want to advertise for? And then what are some of the basics of Amazon advertising in 2025?

whether we're talking about match types and targeting and things of that. So we're going to go a little bit deep into this. And even if your experience, it might be a good refresher, especially some of the keyword research. I would say 90% of sellers are not using all of these keyword strategy methods that I'm talking about. So let's go ahead and hop into it. And then yeah, at the end, we'll also get some of our, your top questions that we had when we recorded this life. Here we go.

I want to take a quick time machine blast of the past when I was launching like a hundred products a year. That was around before I started working at Helium 10 and there right when I started. And in those days, the way to launch products was using outside services that would do like two-step URLs and what we would call giveaways and search find buy. And these were actually not against Amazon terms of service in those days. And then, uh,

We had the Maldives honeymoon. So another thing that has happened in the last six years, these things are out of date. And also I've gained about 60 pounds, as you can see from that picture there. But how do we launch products now if we can't use those services? For those of you who are not old timers, basically what those were was like, hey, I have like these five keywords I want to rank for. So what you would do is you would use this service and then they would get like, you know, 30, 50, 100 people to like search for this keyword and then, you know, add it to the cart, buy it, and then you would rebate them.

And then that's the way you would get to like page one, which is what we want to do when we do launch. You remember those days, right? I absolutely remember those days. So all of a sudden overnight, that became something that you couldn't do anymore. And that's the thing we have to understand about Amazon. All right. Things change. So don't like get so like have your strategy so contingent on one specific thing that your business comes to a screeching halt and you don't know what to do. Before then, what could you do for reviews that was totally allowed on Amazon?

- Do you remember? - Aggressive follow ups? - Not only that, that's kind of crazy. What she said is actually 100% true. You used to be able to send five emails to people and do custom messages and stuff. But even before then, I'm aging myself now in the Amazon world.

you could legally give away product in exchange for a review. And when I say legally, it's not just, oh, it wasn't against Term of Service. It was like a part of Term of Service. There would even be a little badge that said this product was exchanged for a review or something like that. So it was like encouraged by Amazon. And then one night that became not valid. Now, here's the thing. What we're talking about today, guys, I can pretty much, I don't like doing guarantees, but I almost guarantee that

This is never going to become against Amazon in terms of service using advertising, right? Absolutely. In general, the fundamentals we are covering are pretty similar to what we were doing in the old days. We just adjust that strategy. And that's why it's so important to understand the foundation. What we're talking about is driving velocity and customer loyalty and making sure you have a high conversion rate. That's not going to change. That's fundamental to a success in any business.

So if you can take those principles and figure out how to adjust them to the new market, you're going to be successful and you're going to continue to be successful because you're going to be able to reiterate and make your process better as time goes on. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So let's go ahead and hop in. I'm going to take the first kind of like half of this webinar and talk about how to get retail ready, because when we're talking about launch, it's not

Just okay. Hey, what do I do to get to page one? I mean that's the eventual goal right of launching a new product But there are so many things that are lead up to that day even before you even have the product ready and we call this like getting your product retail ready and So there's a couple of podcast episodes, right? I go in more into detail I'm gonna give you kind of a brief overview, but if you guys want to check later on check out episode 466 I like naming things after exotic places that I travel to so I call

the the keyword research strategy the bali blast because i actually came up with it while i was at a conference in in bali and then the actual launch strategy we call it the maldives honeymoon uh launch strategy but but take take note of those two um episodes you can find them at uh if you go to h10.me forward slash 466 or h10.me forward slash 600 and it goes a little bit more into depth about what i'm going to talk about but some of the things i'm talking about today are

even newer than these because the last episode is maybe September. Like I said, I'm talking about a launch I just did a couple of months ago. So when we talk about getting retail ready, there's three aspects. There's keyword research, customer research and listing optimization. A lot of things like inside of those things as well. So let's just first get into the keyword research.

I said before that this was about a launch I just did. Here's the kind of like TLDR. This is the end result of the strategies that I'm going to present today. You can see here that I launched this sample product is some socks. It says beer socks. You might be wondering what the heck is a beer sock? Well,

they're these socks that have like a message on the bottom of the feet where it says like, Hey, bring me beer, bring me beer. Exactly. There's like, I have ones that are like coffee and wine. Uh, side note, the founder of helium 10, who actually was in a previous slide, that was one of his first products in like 2015 when he, um, first started selling on Amazon before there was a helium 10, but within three weeks, you can see we launched this product. And within three weeks, all

of our keywords that I was trying to get ranked for and get visibility, I was in the top 5-10 positions for on Amazon. All right? So these are the strategies that got me to here. It's not just a one step thing. So let's go ahead and hop into keyword research and just know that, hey, the honeymoon period is alive and well. There's people ask me like, oh, I heard there's no such thing as a honeymoon. I was like, those people who say that,

Whatever they're considering honeymoon period is not really what the industry considers a honeymoon period. It's very accurate to say there's no some like secret algorithm in Amazon, right? That says, hey, 60 days, you're going to get crazy visibility and then it's going to stop.

No, there's nothing like that on Amazon. When we say the honeymoon period, it just means that, hey, when you have a brand new listing, Amazon doesn't have that much data about what this product is, what's going to resonate with customers. And so what happens is the pool of data is small. So anything that happens to the listing, it has a lot more impact with ranking and advertising and things like that. And that's what we call the honeymoon period. You have a six month old listing.

Amazon is analyzing millions of data points about how customers have interacted with it, purchases, you know, like, so one little thing, one sale here, one sale there. It's not going to move the needle too much because Amazon kind of knows what's going on. But you have this kind of window of opportunity when a product is brand new, where, you know, signals that are sent to Amazon from customers and from your listing, it has a bigger impact. So let's go ahead and hop into this.

Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked perhaps on their Amazon listing or maybe somebody changed their main image or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash alerts.

First step, guys, how do you find the right keywords? You don't even have it. Let's say you don't have Helium 10, you don't have anything. Guess what, guys? You've got free access to an amazing tool inside of Amazon Seller Central if you've got a professional selling account. It's called the Opportunity Explorer. So take some products

that are existing sellers for some of whatever you're trying to get into a niche and then put them into Opportunity Explorer. See if they're part of niches. Niches are niches of keywords. And then you're gonna get a list of like 10, 15 keywords or more depending on how many niches it's part of. And that's a great starting point about relevant keywords that you've got to make sure that are in your listing.

The next step for those of you who have Helium 10, I assume that most of you do niche keywords. You get the top ones you can get with one click. All right. So you would just put in like an ASIN, a seed ASIN and then the five to top 10 products that are closest to your product. All right. And then you just hit one button. It's called the top keywords button in Cerebral. Hit one button and boom goes a dynamite. You are going to get a list of the top keywords in that niche.

Sometimes it's three keywords, sometimes it's 10, sometimes it's 30, could be 50 if it's a big niche. But basically what this list of keywords are,

are the keywords that most of the top sellers of this product are getting their sales from just with one click. All right, so add that to your list. Next thing is what I call opportunity keywords. It's the same thing on that same Cerebro search that you're doing. And like I said, I didn't want this to be like a how to use Helium 10 or Product Opportunity Explorer. We have very detailed videos

on how to use Opportunity Explorer, how to use Cerebro. This is just showing you what you need to look for. And then you could find those more

selective tutorials and get like actual step by step. I'm giving you just a broad overview. But anyways, the next step in Cerebro after you get the top keywords is get opportunity keywords. And these are keywords where maybe only one or two of the top products are ranking for it, where you're not going to be competing with the whole top five or the whole top ten. Usually these are kind of like lower hanging fruits where it might be easier to rank for if you are

just getting started on Amazon. So again, it's a one click button in Cerebros as opportunity keywords, and then you're gonna get a whole bunch of keywords that didn't come up in that top keywords one that you were selecting. Next thing is historical keywords. This is important because products sell differently throughout the year. Like you've got a Mason jar here,

probably that sells kind of like the thing. Can you think of a seasonal product where it's definitely gonna have peaks and valleys? Let's use the Mason jar as an example. So if I'm selling a Mason jar, I could sell Mason jars and that's incredibly broad. And I'm going to be trying to target everyone. In reality, Mason jars have multiple uses. You have the canning community. You can build your listing specifically targeting the canning community. And what you're going to talk about is, you know, the sillability, how well it seals.

Or XYZ. On the flip side, we also have mason jars that are definitely used for weddings. We've seen a rise in that style of wedding decor. It's the barn weddings.

If I'm still selling the same mason jar, maybe I want to create a listing that showcases my mason jar on the table for multiple different weddings. That's the type of audience I'm going to attract. On the flip side, there's people like me who are going to use it for water and use it within their kitchen. That should be a very different listing as well. So that's why it's so important to understand the breakout we're giving you here. The first one was the keywords that are relatively going to rank well, right? It's the mason jar is going to be your highest volume term that you're definitely going to need a target.

On the flip side, we're gonna be looking at opportunity keywords, which is mason jar and wedding mason jar for canning. That should be a whole different audience you're targeting. Cause you're gonna wanna make sure your listing is built for the audience you're wanting to attract. That's where you're gonna get the increase in conversion rate. If you try to target everyone, you're gonna convert no one. But if you get really specific on things like historical keywords, where we can clearly see there was a wedding trend for mason jars. And now we're into the canning community because of the

prices, you know, went on a little bit of a tangent there, but you can see why it matters to break things out because your listing needs to be built towards the audience we're targeting. Absolutely. And she actually just gave me an idea of what she was talking about. Like weddings are, you know, I would assume usually, especially in colder areas, you're not going to have too many barn weddings, maybe in the middle of December. Right? So let's say you were making a mason jar that only had one use. It was only going to be for weddings. So if you were doing your keyword research in December,

you're not going to find too many keywords that there's ranking for like the wedding related keywords. So that's where this historical comes in is take the time machine in Cerebro and look at whenever a wedding season is April, May, June, July. And then what were the keywords that people were converting for them? This is super important because when you're looking at opportunity explorer using the regular Cerebro

It is absolutely great, but it's showing you what's happening right now or in the last month. But a lot of products out there, a more extreme example might be beach ball. It's definitely not going to be sold in December.

Christmas tree ornament is definitely not going to be sold in July. So if it's July and I'm trying to prepare myself for Christmas season, which you shouldn't do in December, you should be doing that in July. You're not going to be able to find the right keywords in July unless you're doing this kind of time machine. So historical keywords is the next step that you need to do to find out what keywords were driving sales for a particular product in its peak season. Only do that with Cerebro.

Next step, brand analytics. This is again something that comes directly from Amazon. It's called brand analytics top search terms. You can get it directly in Amazon. We've got some tools in Helium 10 that tie directly to Amazon to bring that in. So those competitors that you were analyzing in Cerebro, put those in black box and then filter out for the last 20 weeks. Just look at a big chunk of time. What were products that brought it sales? And this is not Helium 10's estimation or some algorithm we use to say, oh, we think that there's sales. No.

This is information coming direct from Amazon that these keywords drove guaranteed sales to these products. So that's another way to find products. To me, this is like the beginning of the cool data that Amazon released because it's probably the older one, like four or five years ago. And now we've got like search career performance and stuff like that. Next step, look at your competitors ad strategy, their advertising strategy. Where are they bidding top of search? Like if you're a pretty good seller,

and you are consistently showing up in the top four sponsored positions on a keyword consistently over time, what does that probably mean? Like, why are they spending money to be top of search? Because it's a really important keyword. Yeah. I mean, so you might be a brand new product and you would learn that over time. Like maybe you'd have some auto campaigns and over time, oh, this keyword is working good. Let me go ahead and put it in a manual campaign. Oh, man, it's still converting. Well, let me make sure my bid is high. So I always show at top of search. You would figure that out on your own anyways.

But guess what? If you have competitors who've been in this market for months or a year, you're basically taking advantage of their research. And now on day one, you're going to be focusing on keywords that they already have proven work for them. So the way to do this is, again, right there in Cerebro, just use a filter and say, hey, where have my competitors been consistently showing in the top five or the top page of Spoonbox?

sponsored results and you know again if they're decent sellers you can just kind of unless they're just throwing money at Amazon for no reason which not many decent sellers do you know you can kind of deduce that they must be getting sales from these keywords otherwise why are they trying to bid you know top of search but again you can get that information right here in helium 10.

Another thing that again comes from Amazon is we call it the Amazon recommended keywords This is an API that we helium 10 exclusively has with Amazon I think anybody can get but for some reason only helium 10 is taking advantage of this where It's kind of like how relevant something is to to Amazon and especially the Amazon advertising platform so this is a score an internal score that

Amazon gives for every keyword compared to every product. So what happens is, let's say that there's a keyword coffin shelf. Well, Amazon has like a list of 200 keywords and each one has a score that says, hey, this is the most relevant keyword for this. It doesn't mean it's the best keyword, but it's just the internal mechanisms of how Amazon's algorithm works or how it views keywords. And so again,

Come in from day one, Amazon's not going to know too much about your product, but plug in your competitors' products and we'll tell you what Amazon thinks is the most relevant keywords to that product. You can only do this with Helium 10, but this is like a lifesaver for me because when we're talking about advertising a brand new product, I'm sure you've seen it before where day one, like you can barely get any impression sometimes and it's usually a relevancy issue.

But if you have like the top phrases that Amazon thinks is relevant for another product, but then you've got like those keywords in your listing, like in phrase form,

What that does is now Amazon's like, oh, you know, we don't know what this new kid on the block is. I just aged myself. This Backstreet Boy is this new kid on the block is. But oh, we notice it's got a lot of similar keywords with this one product. We know what this product is. It's been there a year. And now from day one, you're going to start like showing up in more in auto campaigns and things like that for keywords that some of your competitors are getting impressions on. So this is a super important step as well to kind of like round out

your keyword research. And then the last step, or the last step I'm going to talk about for keyword research here is getting the top keywords from frequently bought together. It's a similar thing. Like here I entered, this was, you can't tell from this ASIN, but this was a coffin letter board. All right, it's like a letter board that you put letters on, shaped like a coffin. And I was doing some research on it, existing competitors, and I noticed

non-letter boards were showing up infrequently, like these are some bat shaped stickers, I guess. - I am concerned with 30th birthdays, which I just celebrated. - Whoa, whoa, whoa. - Being aligned with coffin shelves. - Yes, that's not- - It used to be 50 years over the hill. - A little bit morbid though. - I feel like it's now 30 over the hill. - But then again, you've seen pictures like those memes of like the Golden Girls. - Yes, they're in twos. - They were like 43 or something. 43 nowadays does not look anything like 43 back then. So you're good. - I'm coming in hot. - You're good, you're good.

But anyways, these are not other letter boards. These are like complementary products. And again, so if you kind of relate your products from day one to the products that are showing up frequently bought together, it's again going to widen the net of where your ads, your advertisements, if you're running auto campaigns and are going to show up. And this is, again, information from Amazon. The frequently bought together is from Amazon. Amazon is telling you, hey,

your competitor they had a letter board and there was a lot of people who the same time they bought this letter board they bought these bat-shaped stickers now i have an advantage over other uh you know coffin letter boards who are just launching who don't realize that they're relevant to these other kind of non-relevant you know uh products but again it's going to help you in advertising so real quick the the last uh step here is

Amazon is not just about keywords. You've got to understand the customer. This is not new. Anybody who's been teaching how to sell on Amazon for any time, a period of time will tell you, yes, you have to be relevant to the algorithm. That's what the keywords are for. You got to show up in search. But at the end of the day, are you selling to the algorithm? Who are you selling to?

The customer. The customer. Hopefully you guys say that in the chat here too. Yeah, waiting. It goes back to our Mason jar example. The Mason jar data is going to tell you what are your top keywords, but it's your job to understand what customer you're selling to and how to adjust your creative, your content, your main image to that specific niche audience that's going to give you a competitive advantage over everyone else. Absolutely. Absolutely. So again,

Yes, be relevant to the algorithm, but be relevant to a human being. You are selling to a real person and you've got to connect with them if you want a better chance. So how what can you do that's outside of the scope of keywords for that? One is look at the reviews.

You know like this was this is another product I had done a test sounds like this toy storage hammock and I was looking at the reviews of another product and I was just looking at what were the common two and three word phrases that this is from helium 10 insights and I could see hey people were were saying how cute it was that's not a key very cute is not a keyword that people search for thinking that they're gonna get a toy storage it's like very cute let me type that in that's not a keyword it's not a search term it's not something you advertise for but

That tells me, hey, in my images and in my product, I got to convey the thing that, hey, my product is cute and people who see it will think it's cute. All right. Daughter's room was one of the top keywords. So now I'm like, OK, for my images, I got to make sure to have to show that it's in maybe a girly style of room and girly toys or something and show, hey, do you have a

daughter who has a lot of stuffed animals, look how you can use it. These are not keywords, but it's use cases. It's the persona you're thinking of. All right? So this is important to put in your listing to be retail ready

the kind of like emotional touch points about how somebody might use your product. Another free tool that's available inside of Amazon, going back to the Opportunity Explorer, they've got AI assisted summaries overview. So look at your competitors. If they're in Opportunity Explorer, look at the customer review insights there and see what kind of things that they are showing up for.

Next thing is look at their image strategy. All right. Again, people have been selling for a year or two or three years. They change their images based on the feedback they get from customers, based on what they see resonates well. Take advantage of their one, two, three years of research and customer testing. Look if you see common things like, hey, man, everybody in their fifth or sixth image has like, what do you call it when it's the measurements? Is there a word for that kind of thing?

Yeah, but... It's like an info... kind of like an infographic, but... Dimensions? Dimensions? Yes, yes. It's like a dimensional infographic where it shows the, you know, "Hey, this is 10 inches wide and 20 inches, you know, tall," and stuff like that. Like, "Hey, everybody, all my competitors have that one, that same image around their third or fourth image.

Usually it's not by coincidence because that's what they found works best. You should probably have your third or fourth image, something similar to that. Just make sure that you take a look at your competitor's images. You can do that pretty quickly just by looking at their images and putting them on a PowerPoint or in Helium 10 Listing Analyzer is where this screenshot comes in.

uh last part this is again last part because this is this is not used by too many people but rufus ai sometimes look at the questions that people are asking now almost nobody

on the buyer side is using Rufus. So this should not be one of the first things. If people are telling you on LinkedIn or other places, hey, Rufus is the most important thing you need to be worried about, forget that, it's not. But if you've done all the other things, this can help. Like here's a listing I changed because of Rufus. There was a question that was coming up on competitors listings that says, how sturdy and durable is it?

And on my listing, it didn't know the answer. Right. So what I did was I changed the one of the bullet points to answer that question. And within 10 minutes of the listing being updated, now Rufus said, oh, according to the product description, it is sturdy and durable. So, yes, for the very small handful of customers that are using Rufus, you want to be optimized.

for that as well so then the last step just put everything together in your listing optimization um and you know you do that by making sure all those search terms and keywords are in your listing so it can be indexed making sure those emotional touch points and those connection points with the customer are in there that you did from your customer research put it all together to make a good listing and then you guys can screenshot this i'm not going to go in in to detail here but the last steps you know that i did for these these launches i've been doing you know

Do some tests with the pricing, you know, try and establish that list price so you can get like a strike through price if you have a coupon code. Make sure you use Amazon one. You can get two reviews for free. Ten. I don't know how much it costs. It was like $50 or $100 for ten. And then I think it's like you want 30 reviews. It costs like a couple hundred dollars. That's verified reviews from actual customers and 100% Amazon team.

TOS Terms of Service compliant because it's from Amazon. Always do Amazon Vine. Make sure that you're indexed for your main keywords. And then I like to choose five, 10 keywords that I'm going to launch for. I use Helium 10 ads to make my campaigns because it's so much easier to manage. And then I'm just going really hard for those initial keywords that I think I can start ranking for right away. And as you saw, within three weeks,

I was on page one for all of those keywords because I did all of these steps. So that's more of the retail ready, but let's dive a little bit more into advertising and Destiny is going to be talking a little bit more about that.

So it's really important to understand the keyword research that needs to be done here because all of that should be directly integrated with your Amazon advertising strategy, which is what we really wanted to talk about here. So you have the keywords, you understand the volume potential with those keywords, you understand your competitive advantage on the Mason jar example. How do we integrate that directly into ads?

Well, first and foremost, I think it's important to understand Amazon targeting. So within Amazon Advertising Console, we have three different options. We have sponsored products, sponsored brands, and sponsored display. This is, you log into Ad Console, you're going to see this. If we look at the next slide, what we're gonna dive into is where those ad types show up on the page. So the very top of the page you can see, right, is a sponsored brand ad. Everything highlighted in green. Directly below that, it's for sponsored product ads.

Now pausing here real fast, Amazon advertising is such an important part of your strategy because those ads can show up at the top of the page. How long did it take you to get ranked decently well for? - Organically? - Yep. - It was like three, four weeks. - Three to four weeks. And that's normal. I mean, that's pretty fast actually is what I would say. But if you launch a product on Amazon from scratch, it would be incredibly naive to think you can get on page one that quick. But as a customer, does anyone go to page two?

I don't. No one goes to page two. So in order to get yourself in maximum visibility early on, you need to bid on the terms that are most relevant for your product. Now, of those three targeting types, sponsored products, sponsored brands, and sponsored display, we almost always recommend starting with sponsored products. Why? Well, as you can see, they look just like an organic listing. They show up at the top of the page and throughout the page. Sponsored products in general are typically going to drive around 70% to 80% of your advertising sales.

Sponsored brands get amazing visibility at the top of the page. They're a little bit more difficult to run due to creative setup. They're going to drive an additional 5% to 20% of ad sales.

Turning slides here, we're going to see on the PDP, we also have sponsored display. Sponsored display is highlighted in red, has a lot less inventory. There's a lot less real estate to bid on. So sponsored display is only 0% to 5% of your total ad sales. But as you can see here, that blue carousel is another sponsored product carousel. There's 33 sponsored product items there.

Sponsored products take up the lion's share of real estate on the page. So that's why I always say they influence your organic positioning a little bit more than anything else because they're going to drive the most sales for you. So now we know about targeting, we can move to the next slide.

You've kind of segmented and said, "Hey, let's start with sponsored product ads. I have the keywords that I want. Now, do I go automatic targeting? Do I go manual targeting? Do I go product targeting? Do I go category targeting?" In general, starting with an auto campaign is probably the easiest campaign you can run. Most people jump straight into automatic targeting just because maybe they're unsure of their keywords. Maybe they didn't listen to a single thing Bradley said. They're incredibly distracted by me sitting next to him.

Skip all of that. They go straight into an auto campaign to help them with keyword research. I think that's one of the most beneficial aspects of an auto campaign.

So if you're launching a product from scratch, we always recommend starting an auto campaign, keeping your bids a little bit low because that's going to allow the algorithm to start showing what products they think are related to your ASIN. Now, in the beginning, if you have no data, no reviews, the auto campaign may not perform that well because again, Amazon isn't quite sure what keywords to show up for your listings. They may go really broad.

If this is the case and you did pay a ton of attention to the beginning of Bradley's webinar, you know exactly what keywords you want to target. I always recommend starting with a sponsored product manual campaign. This means you are hand selecting the keywords that you are going to be showing up for. You know what's best. You know you want to bid on mason jar. You're going to put that into a campaign.

Now, within manual targeting, we do have keyword and product targeting. Those are both beneficial. Product targeting allows you to target specific ASINs, so if you did the reverse ASIN research and you understand what you need to target from a competitive advantage standpoint, we can

We can create a campaign targeting all of our competitor ASINs. It's truly as easy as uploading a list of ASINs that are your direct competitors and making sure your ad shows up on their product detail page. If you want to go a little bit broader, we have category targeting as well. Category targeting kind of cast a really wide net and allows you to bid on every term within a category. Typically not best for someone that's starting in the very beginning. It tends to go a little bit too broad and kind of cast a wide net so you can get a lot of clicks but not a lot of sales.

So going back to the automatic targeting campaign in a little bit more depth, when you create this campaign, it's going to allow you to target close match, loose match, substitutes and compliments. Pretty much what that's saying is Amazon's going to open up and cast a wide net. They're going to target terms that are close to your product. They're going to analyze your mason jar and say, okay, maybe we need to show up for water glass or canning glass or canning jar, right?

We're going to target loose match, which is maybe going to go even broader. Maybe we're going to target something like gardening or homestead or weddings again. Substitutes and compliments are what are products that can be directly substituted for my mason jar that I could show up to that's going to convert a customer. Compliments is targeting products that can be used complimentary to my mason jar. Maybe it's what do you set your coaster? Yeah, coaster. Maybe it's going to show up for a coaster because we know customers are going to kind of broadly switch between the two.

Out of the four of these, I think it's pretty easy to see what targeting types are gonna be a little bit more closely related. In the early stages of a launch, we always recommend targeting closely related terms. I typically keep on close match and maybe turn off loose match and substitutes and complements in the beginning. 'Cause again, I don't wanna cast too wide of a net. We're not 100% sure what terms we're gonna show up for in the early stages. So we try to keep it really precise so that way we can kind of guide Amazon on what keywords are most important because we did all of the keyword research from the beginning.

Now, next slide. I am in control. You can see we have keyword match types. So again, I chose a sponsored product ad. I decided on manual targeting this time around. What match type do you use? So match type can get a little bit tricky because as you can see in the below example, cat toy was the term that I wanted to target. It was incredibly important to me. It's my most relevant keyword. If I bid on exact match, I'm only showing up for cat toy.

So exact match, you're only bidding on Cat Toy. Again, this is a really precise approach to running your Amazon ads because you did the keyword research ahead of time. You only want to show up for this term.

Now, the problem with that is it can be really competitive because everyone else is bidding on cat toy. So maybe we want to go to phrase match and expand that search a little bit. So we're still bidding on cat toys, but now in phrase match, we may show up for best cat toys for indoor cats. It's the phrase that includes that original search. That's going to broaden our approach a little bit while still allowing us to be

pretty concise with our targeting, right? Phrase match typically drives more sales because again, we're showing up for more searches at this point, but maybe it doesn't convert as well because maybe I have an outdoor cat. So I'm bidding on indoor cat in the phrase match, but I have an outdoor cat toy. So maybe my conversion's a little bit lower. It's going a little bit too broad.

which does bring us to broad match broad match is exactly that it takes a key point a key roots cap toys toys and it expands it so the good thing with broad match we run broad match strategies in general is expand your reach a ton i have a rottweiler who's absolutely obsessed with

walking around and chewing on all the cat toys. He does not prefer his dog toys. He wants the little tiny feathers and the little tiny mice. He carries them and takes them away from the cat. So yes, maybe if I bid on cat toys, I will convert for dog toys. That is why broad match is so important. But in the early stages, when you don't know that, you don't know the keyword research, broad match can be a little bit too aggressive. So maybe you want to focus on exact match and phrase match in the early stages. So I wanted

to use a really quick example. You mentioned suggested keywords and how it's built directly into Helium 10. This is what it looks like directly within Ad Console as well. It is incredibly important to do your keyword research because as we mentioned in the mason jar example, some terms are going to be direct and drive the majority of your volume. Air fryer, as you can see with a space, is the most competitive. It has the highest suggested bids here. That's because

Keyword research is a little bit of common sense in the beginning. If I'm selling chapstick, I'm betting on chapstick. If I'm selling mason jar, I'm bidding on mason jar. But if you are thinking to bid on that, so is everyone else. So yes, you want to bid on it because your customers are typing it in, but you also want to do the long tail keyword research that we talked about. We want to look at the historical trends and see if maybe names have changed for our products. We want to look at the long tail terms because those can often be a lot less competitive.

Air fryer, toaster, oven combo, glass air fryer, deep fryer, air fryer with no space. Those are all a little bit cheaper because not everyone else is thinking to bid on them as aggressively. So when you're bidding on your main terms, that's going to drive your sales typically, but it's also going to be the most expensive because it's an auction. Everyone's wanting to bid on that placement. If we do the long tail keyword research, we can get a lot cheaper suggested bids and a lot cheaper bids in general because not everyone's thinking to bid on those terms.

Now a little soapbox here. I always get the question of like Amazon suggested bids are terrible. They don't work. Like, I don't know why that's an assumption in the space. How suggested bidding works is it takes all of those full placements that we discussed earlier top of search, which is a billboard ad bottom of search product detail page. And it averages them out. It is very likely for air fryer played in that space. The top of search bid is 10 to $12. Whoa. It's insane. But,

the sponsored product out on page five may only cost 13 cents because no one's going there so your suggested bids are kind of an average on the market pricing it's how much everyone is bidding across all of those different placements so that's why there's a wide variation in suggested bids

I like to use it as a guide rail to say, hey, air fryer again looks to be our most expensive. Makes sense. It's our top keyword. Deep fryer, which is a whole different product, is going to be a lot cheaper. Looks like there's a little bit of a market for deep fryers nowadays as well. Air fryers are a little bit trendy, so it's a good opportunity to dive into. Now, to kind of close up on the targeting types, I wanted to talk a little bit about bid management with the targeting types.

So with an auto campaign, as mentioned, Amazon's doing a lot of the heavy lifting with the keywords. It's casting a wide net. It's pulling in all those keywords that we discussed earlier.

The problem with that is you're setting the bid at the campaign level. We're going to talk a little bit more about bid management after this, but you don't have control over all of those separate keywords. So we looked at the example of dog toys showing up in a broad match campaign. You can see here if I bid on an auto campaign, $1.37, all of those search terms could potentially cost us $1.37. There's not a lot of control.

In a manual campaign where you are doing your own keyword research, you're able to set the bid at the keyword level. This is incredibly, incredibly important because now I can take all of those auto campaign search terms that are doing well for me and set the own bid. So for dog toy, I'm going to bid a lot lower because again, I'm selling a cat toy. I don't want to bid high on that. I don't want to pay for the best traffic because it's not going to convert.

But for cat toy, maybe I want to bid a little bit higher because it is relevant. Cat toy for kittens, that's exactly what my product is. It is designed for kittens. I want to bid the most because that's where I'm going to get the maximum visibility at the top of the page.

So that's kind of an entry into how your bid management needs to change based on your targeting types, which leads us to understanding Amazon bids. So let's talk about Amazon bid management. I think this is one of the more difficult topics when it comes to Amazon advertising. There's a hundred different directions we can go here, but to set the context, Amazon advertising is real estate at the end of the day. And when you're opening a retail business, the first thing they tell you is location, location, location. If you open up a retail store selling wine in the middle of

nowhere. How are people going to see it? They're not. If you open up a wine store in the middle of the Vegas strip, everyone's going to see it and you're going to have a lot of foot traffic. It's the same thing with Amazon advertising. We are just bidding on real estate. The real estate at the top of the page that I have highlighted here is the most competitive real estate in the space because

Everyone sees it. If you type in any search term and scroll down, the first thing you're going to see is the sponsored ads at the top of the page. If you want to win that placement, you bid on a relevant keyword and you bid really, really high, like really high. That's how you win that. Now, the trade off for that expensive placement is a ton of traffic, a ton of clicks and potentially a ton of sales if it's relevant.

But not everyone can afford that. So some people want to bid a little bit lower. And maybe when you bid lower, your ad shows up on the product detail page. And maybe it shows up on page two. You get less traffic on a specific product detail page because not everyone's clicking on that product detail page from their search. So

Your bid's cheaper. It's a little bit, I would say, more efficient. You typically have a better ACoS, a higher ROAS, but the trade-off is you get less sales because you're not showing up in a high traffic placement. That's really important to understand. So how do you balance the two with bid management? Well, here's kind of a quick example I'm going to use. Now, let's assume my variables are constant across the board.

You can see that with a 20% conversion rate, it means 20% of the people that view my listing buy my product. I have a $20 product and I'm getting 20 clicks. Your bid has a direct correlation with your ACoS. The higher your bid, potentially the higher your ACoS. The lower your bid, lower your ACoS. That's really how bid management works. Now, why doesn't that work directly? Well, because when I am bidding lower,

I am not getting as much traffic, right?

I think the first thing that I always get asked on sales calls or discovery calls with brands is I want to increase my sales and decrease my ACoS. That's everyone's dream, but it doesn't always work like that because this is how bid management works. You bid high, you show up on page one, you bid low, you can afford it. Your ACoS is fantastic, but you get a lot less sales. So every brand's goal should be balancing that profitability and scalability, but for your own brand goals.

Now, this is where it gets interesting because Amazon is a flywheel. So if you bid higher and you drive more sales, more people are going to buy your product and you're going to get more reviews. And when you get more reviews, your conversion rates better. When your conversion rates better, your organic rank increases. So a lot of people like to view Amazon advertising in a silo and say, hey, I only want to target a certain ACoS.

At the end of the day, you need to view the bigger picture of if you're driving more sales with ads, can you improve your organic rank? And when your organic rank improves, your total sales are going to improve. So the goal of Amazon advertising should be finding this balance bidding low to focus on profitability, bidding high to focus on sales and scalability. When you're launching a product, this is incredibly, incredibly important to realize because kind of as Bradley says, Amazon doesn't exactly know where to put you on the page in the early stages.

So we like to take those keywords that are priority and bid high on them so we can drive a ton of traffic up front, get a lot of orders, and that's going to help ignite that organic rank. If I'm bidding on dog toy and 50 people buy a dog toy in the very beginning, Amazon's going to say, I have a lot of data that shows when people type in dog toy, they buy this product. That means Amazon's making money. So how does that product increase on the page? It's through data. And where does that data come from? It can be your Amazon advertising. I'll pause there. Any thoughts?

Yeah, this is important because let's just dive a little bit deeper into what you were talking about and what we see here in this slide is how does, maybe this is what they're asking, how do you know then where to find that balance? So obviously in the beginning, yes, I aim, you guys saw that I got to page one. That wasn't in a profitable way. I actually aim to lose money because my conversion rate's not going to be great. I'll probably get clicks, but here, maybe my bid is $3, as you guys see in the slide,

and my ACoS is 75%, but I'm fine all day long. Am I making money at 75% ACoS? No, but I'm getting those sales. When I'm a new product, my conversion rate might not be great because people will see one, two, three reviews or something, you know, so I, and my price is lower, so that is going to make my ACoS worse, but I'm totally,

I'm totally fine with 75% ACoS when I launch a product. I'm fine with 100% ACoS. But then over time, that's not sustainable. You're not going to have a sustainable business. So then you kind of want to move to this lower one. But then still, it's not like your sales are going to tank because theoretically speaking, by that time, hopefully your organic rank is up and you're getting free sales where you're not paying that. So now you've got a mixture. So this is a really great slide. I hope you guys understand what you're looking at here. And I think to Bradley's first question, how do you find that balance?

And that's what's difficult about these webinars is everyone wants the textbook answer. It takes $500. Yes. Like they want, it takes $500 target three keywords, only an exact match. And again, on a full moon, it doesn't work that way. We have some brands that will, you know, launch with a $5,000 budget and they can rank a lot quicker. We have some brands that only have $500 a month, and that's going to take a little bit longer because it's going to take time to gather that velocity. If you have $5,000 budget,

you can drive 500 orders in a few days. If you have a $100 budget, it's going to take you additional time to gather that velocity. So the real answer is finding the perfect balance for you and your cash flow, but also being realistic at the expectations here. The problem

problem with bid management is the market sets the cost. Again, we're going back to real estate. So yes, you may think that top of search should only cost $2, but if your competitor is willing to pay $25 for that placement and someone else is paying 26, the market is setting the demand.

And a lot of people forget that. Like I said, everyone wants a lower A cost. So they're like, lower your bid, lower your bid. I'm like, yeah, but everyone else is paying this. So it's hard to find that balance. That's for sure. If we take it one step further, we just talk about bidding strategy. Within Amazon advertising console, you're also going to see different levels of bidding strategy. You're going to see fixed bids. You're going to see dynamic bids down only dynamic bids up and down.

So in general, I personally like to run with a fixed bid because I want to know exactly what my bid is that's going to get me that ACoS that I am trying to achieve. As we discussed in the slide prior, certain softwares are going to do dynamic bidding up and down. Some are going to do down only. It's really dependent on, I would say, like your threshold for aggression, similar to like stock market risk.

If you want to be more aggressive and drive more sales, you're probably going to do dynamic bids up and down with a placement modifier. If you want to be a little bit more conservative, you're going to do dynamic bids down only. If you have control issues like I do, you're going to do fixed bids so you can calculate the perfect outcome every single time. The next thing is you're also going to have placement modifiers that you can stack on top of your bid management.

And again, going back to Bradley's point in the very beginning, this is a high level. We have a lot of segmented content. I'm going a little bit deeper. And once we're getting into placement modifiers, we're getting in the weeds here. But I know this is something that people frequently see within ad console and it always comes up in our questions.

Now, placement modifiers is taking things even a step further. So as Bradley and I have talked about, top of search, it's an incredible place to be. It's some of the highest converting placements on the page. Think about it as a customer. If you're typing in mason jar and I'm clicking on the first thing I see, I'm probably highly likely to buy.

If I scroll to page two or page three, I'm less likely to buy. I may be a little bit more price conscious, a little bit more conservative, and I'm shopping around. Top of Search is an incredible place to be from a conversion rate perspective. So if you open up your placements within Ad Console under your bidding strategy, you're going to see we can also make bid adjustments for Top of Search, Rest of Search, and/or product pages.

This is an interesting kind of use case. You can see that my top of search ACOS is 3%. - Good grief. - Insane. - $50,000 of sales at three. - Insane. - This is a real screenshot right here? - Yes, this is a real screenshot. - I want this at Amazon account. - It's a high priced product.

But you can see product pages are 45%. For this product, this makes sense. I am more expensive than anything else in the market. So when I'm advertising on someone else's product detail page, it's hard to convert because they're like, why would I pay three times? I'm looking at a cheaper product. Why would I buy a more expensive product? So what we do here is we increase our top of search modifier because again, the customer that clicks on the first ad on the page, typically a little bit less price conscious. So they're ready to buy. So I thought it was important to kind of dive into placement modifiers.

Now, the last thing in this kind of section I'm going to talk about is the bidding strategy. The bidding math can be really difficult because you need to update it really frequently. You should be updating your bids multiple times a week, if not multiple times a day in a competitive category. But if you don't know the math on how to balance your profitability and your sales, then it is a project to manage on your own. I don't even manage

bids manually anymore. We typically utilize a software because the software is going to allow us to choose the outcome we want and then work within that outcome. So within Helium 10 Ads, something that we utilize is the bidding templates, which says, hey, I'm going to maximize profitability, select. I'm going to maximize sales, select. I'm going to maximize launching, which is all about sales and impressions. That

That's going to allow us to then apply that bid optimization formula to every single keyword in every single campaign that we are working with. So you don't have to do all of the heavy lifting on your own. You're the one who made a couple of these formulas. All of these. These ones. All of them worked closely. I thought we were going to put your name on there. Like this is the destiny special one or something. That was too scary. Okay.

But I think the important thing to understand is it can be done on your own. But you can see how difficult it can be to scale because again, the market is setting the demand. So you have to be constantly evaluating your strategy based on the competitors and what their bidding is. And you can see the balance here, right? We started with creating keywords for the algorithm.

Finding keywords for the algorithm is what keywords are most people searching, how much volume are they driving, and how well are they converting. The second piece of this is, okay, let's take that list of keyword research we did and align it to our specific audience that we are targeting, whether that's in your main image, it's how you're doing your content, your stores, things like that. Now we're taking that needs to be funneled directly into your ads. Again, advertising strategy is so dependent on things like budget, which is where this is a hard webinar. A lot of people are going to be in the comments be like, okay, I was looking for the exact playbook.

you can't always give an exact playbook. You have to understand how to be flexible based on what the market's doing. And I think that's something that as a seller, you're going to have to lean into definitely. Yep. So, uh,

Well, this is not the exact playbook. This is a great overview that gives you a starting point so you know what direction to go. And a lot of this applies to I don't care what level of seller you are. You're a brand new seller launching your first product. You've got 100 products under your belt. You need to launch your 101st. You're going to use a lot of the same strategies, but you just got to tailor make it to what works for you. She showed you a screenshot of Vitamin C top page.

I almost guarantee that those placements are like 10, $15 cost per click. - The headline ad gets up to 40. - $40 cost per click for vitamin C, for a $20 vitamin C. I'm selling coffin shelves, a lot less competitors there. I'm paying 30, 40 cents. So again, it's not one size fits all or the same thing, but the basic principles behind these strategies are the same for everybody. And so that's why all of you guys can benefit.

We're going to take some questions now. So a lot of the tools that we were showing today is either free inside of Amazon, Product Opportunity Explorer, Brand Analytics we showed you a little bit of, or most of you said you were Helium 10 members, you have access to almost all these. If there's a couple of you who don't have a Helium 10 account,

Highly recommend trying out the diamond plan every single thing we showed. If you had the diamond plan, you absolutely would have access to you can go to helium 10.com use a discount code SSP. By the way, it's a plug for the serious sellers podcast. That's what it sounds like you can hear destiny usually once a month on there and myself so SSP 10 will get you 10% off if you're a new customer who wants to try helium 10 ads. It comes with a dime but you said you usually have to pay separately now it just

comes, you know, no extra charge to use the software and then you'll be able to use the rules that she made and she humbly did not name after herself. She didn't want to take credit there, but make sure to get the Diamond plan. If you're on Platinum upgrade, give it a try on your next product launch. Have you seen a flip from organic search to paid search since 2023? We used to be 70/30 organic to paid.

in 23 to now 30, 70. - Absolutely. I mean, if you opened up Amazon and typed in a search bar lately, Bradley and I did this yesterday. And I mean, I think 45% of the page, if not more is sponsored ads.

And this is always a fun to me. Everyone's like, okay, well, I'm going to pull back ads because I'm ranked number one. Even if you're ranked number one, the first four things and the number one placement is ads. And this is a fun, you know, the market setting, the demand thing. Everyone's like, okay, maybe I won't bid if you don't bid someone else will. So in the beginning, I would say four to five years ago is around 70, 30. Then we saw a shift to 60, 40. Nowadays for brands that are not ranked in the top four, it's

probably 50/50, if not higher, leaning towards ads. If you have high repeat purchase rates and you're ranked really well, you can kind of keep that 70/30 split, but you better have some brand loyalty and a lot of DSP retargeting to help assist with that.

Somebody was asking about relaunch. So, you know, a lot of the stuff we were talking about today is launching. Now, when you relaunch, you're not going to get that algorithmic love that a new one, you know, like the honeymoon effect. Because like we talked about the beginning, Amazon's already got a million data points. So it's not like you're going to fool Amazon like, oh, it's been doing terribly all this time. We're going to go ahead and give it the benefit of the doubt and shoot it up the rankings. No, you've got six months of profit.

perhaps poor performance right that being said a lot of the principles still would apply you know like you could do a big discount you know like 50 off or something on your product and and try and get more conversions that's going to definitely boost your conversion rate your click-through rate from search and and if you go aggressive in your amazon advertising yeah you might gradually start moving back up or if you just keep things going the way it is um

They also ask, hey, should I do giveaways without requiring reviews? No, if you're talking about giveaways in the old sense, that's against Amazon in terms of service. So do not do that. Where in Amazon do I find the keyword suggestions? The one that Destiny was showing, like if you add a new campaign and it's a keyword campaign, there will be a tab that says suggested keywords. What you don't see there is like a score. So Helium 10 brings all of the keywords that Amazon has in its database and sorts it by the score. But at least using that,

Amazon advertising one, you should see at least five, 10 keywords, if not more. And there's no score there, but usually all of those are pretty well, pretty highly relevant. - Small life hack, if you add your ASIN and you go to your suggested keywords and they're not relevant, that typically means you have a problem with your listing. - Yes, yes. - 'Cause Amazon is suggesting keywords that aren't aligned. So we typically see this with a new product launch. I'll go in and look at my suggested keywords. If they're bad, Amazon does not know what to align your product with. So maybe don't run an auto campaign.

So important. And that's why if you have Helium 10, I always say you have your listing up, make it live, run it through and check the Amazon recommended rank, sort it from one to 20. And if you see some nonsense, like I had problems where I was selling some socks. It wasn't the beer socks, but it was coffee socks.

And I started my campaigns, I was like, why am I not getting impressions on these main keywords, which is like gifts for coffee lovers and stuff like that. Well, it's because when I look at the Amazon recommended keywords, what Amazon thought I was relevant for was just like black sock, pink sock, like these generic keywords. Because if you think about it,

Coffee is a keyword that kind of belongs in the grocery category, right? And I'm selling socks, which is in the clothing category. So it kind of makes sense that Amazon was confused, even though I had the word coffee everywhere in my listing. So I saw, hey, I had to send some relevancy signals to Amazon before I would start showing up in that Amazon recommended. Thanks, guys, very much for joining us. And we'll see you next time. Bye bye now.