#564 – What Happened After He Took Over His Amazon PPC
Audio version above. Video version below
What happens months after you take your Amazon advertising in-house? In this Outsourced to Optimized reunion, Carrie Miller welcomes back PPC expert Destaney Wishon and brand owner Jason Ross for an honest look at his progress since O2O Season 2. After learning to manage his campaigns with Helium 10 Ads, Jason gained the confidence to launch products more strategically, question recommendations, and connect advertising with his broader business goals. But his journey also included an expensive reminder that testing without proper controls can quickly hurt profitability.
One of Jason’s biggest breakthroughs came from Sponsored Brands. Selling dog and cat toys priced around $7.99 to $13.99, he initially assumed the format was better suited to bigger brands with higher-priced products. Since the series, Sponsored Brands has grown from roughly 5% to 26% of his advertising spend. Jason explains how focused audience targeting and showcasing newer products alongside established favorites helped him rethink the opportunity. Destaney breaks down why creative, bids, and campaign structure matter when evaluating whether an ad format can work for your brand.
AI has also changed how Jason manages the business. Using Claude with Helium 10’s MCP integration, he investigates campaign performance, receives daily alerts, and asks follow-up questions before acting on recommendations. A weekly profitability dashboard has replaced a reporting process that previously took about three hours every Friday. On the creative side, Jason combines real product photography with ChatGPT to develop image options, then gathers feedback through Helium 10 Audience. He shares one example where sales doubled the week after an image update, illustrating why faster, more affordable testing has become central to his approach.
The conversation also explores Amazon’s evolving advertising tools, audience personalization, and Sponsored Review Requests, which Destaney describes as being in alpha at the time of recording. Throughout the discussion, she emphasizes that easier access and automation still require clear business priorities and strategic judgment. Jason’s experience shows the value of understanding your advertising, whether you manage it yourself or work with an agency. Start with a clear objective, put controls around your experiments, and use what you learn to make your next decision stronger.
Ready to put AI to work in your business? Check out Helium 10’s free AI Bootcamp for Ecommerce sellers with expert-led lessons and downloadable skills to help you get started: http://h10.me/aibootcamp
In episode 564 of the AM/PM Podcast, Carrie, Destaney, and Jason discuss:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 01:17 – An Outsourced to Optimized Series Reunion
- 03:24 – Applying the Lessons to Product Launches
- 05:47 – Growing With Sponsored Brands
- 11:30 – Audience Targeting and Costly Testing Mistakes
- 14:44 – Testing AMC Audiences With More Control
- 18:57 – Creating and Testing Product Images With AI
- 23:04 – Amazon Updates and Sponsored Review Requests
- 29:27 – Claude, Helium 10 MCP, and Profitability Reporting
- 31:45 – Should You Bring Amazon PPC In-House?
- 32:57 – Choosing AI Tools That Help Your Business
- 35:39 – Ranking, Low-Review Launches, and AI Bootcamp
Transcripts
Carrie Miller:
On today’s episode of the AM/PM podcast, we have Destaney Wishon, PPC expert and Jason Ross, who was on our second season of Outsource to Optimize. And they’re going to be talking about how he’s been doing managing his own ads over the last six months or so and what it’s been like and what his progress has been after she basically trained him to be able to do that with Helium 10 ads. So it’s definitely an episode you don’t want to miss.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everybody and welcome to the AM/PM podcast. My name is Carrie Miller and I’ll be your host.And this is the show where we discuss all things, Amazon, TikTok shop and Walmart private label and how to generate recurring revenue streams 24 hours a day during the AM and the PM. Hence the name of the show, get it? AM/PM podcast. And as a matter of fact, last night I went to a volleyball game with a friend and while I was at that game, I was still making money. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone. And welcome to our update on Outsource to Optimize. We have a really great update for you and a lot of great information and maybe some other announcements towards the end that would be very helpful for y’all. Okay. So I’m going to just go ahead. I’m going to bring on Destaney and Jason and I’m going to let them kind of take it from here.
Destaney:
Amazing. So for those who are just tuning in and maybe had a chance to get familiar with Outsource to Optimize when we first ran the series, the whole concept was as a brand owner, how do you go from either outsourcing your PPC to optimizing on your own or to at least learning what really is fundamental to making your advertising successful so that way you can then better manage your software or your agency. Jason got thrown into figuring this out. I met up with him. We got to meet up in person to a lot of this series. And if you want to talk about the absolute perfect experiment case study, it was Jason. You were so much fun to work with. So Jason, thank you so much for joining the series, but also how are things going?
Jason:
Oh, it’s been good. Man, so much has changed even since I think our filming started in late spring in March or April. And I mean, just at the pace of change, we’re talking earlier. It’s hard to keep up and trying to figure out what the right things are too. But man, I had lots of wins, some losses and learnings since the series, some overconfidence, some underconfidence.But yeah, I’m glad to be back. Glad to be back. I love that. It’s called The Reunion. It feels like it.
Destaney:
I absolutely love that. And one thing I loved about the series is that it was a real brand experiment.It’s easy for me to go on LinkedIn and post recommendations and strategies for anyone to follow. You see a lot of gurus and thought leaders that are posting recommendations and strategies. And I think a narrative we frequently see in the space is it’s not always the most transparent. Everyone wants to cover the flashy, shiny side of running a brand. And a big part of this series was you actually allowing us to lift the hood and share screen on your account, your Seller Central, your Helium 10 ads account. And to your point, we had some wins and there was also some losses. So fast forward, however many months it’s been since we started. How are things going?
Jason:
Good. I mean, overall, since then we’ve launched some products. I did it a lot more thoughtfully this time. So that was fun. Just with some of the systems I was able to put in place.
Destaney:
You had a naming system this time around, which helps.
Jason:
Well, yeah. And I mean, I even left back to March and I was sitting on the plane flying out and literally editing each name for an ad group and campaign. And it’s like, how silly is that in the world of AI now? So it’s now knowing the strategies and then with some of the AI tools to be able to do some of those more controlled tests at scale has been a big win. Some confidence to try new things. And I think that was honestly the biggest learning of the series for me was not the math of ACOS and TACOS, but the pace of Amazon is fast. The pace of AI is fast and sometimes the best way to do it. In the past, I was too afraid to get my hands dirty because I felt like I didn’t know. Lifting the hood back. I’m also not sure the agency that I was paying a lot of money every month knew either though.And so being able to then take those tests and align our images to it, our titles are copied to it in a controlled fashion. It feels a little more holistic versus segmented as it was before.
Destaney:
Absolutely. When you first get started, there are some levers that you can pull that can actually really destroy your business, if we’re being honest. But there’s also some levers to pull that can allow you to test and learn and to really figure out Amazon ads. And I think that was a big aspect of going into outsource to optimize is there’s no one size fits all playbook. So let’s talk about the correlation between your bid and your placement modifiers in an outcome. Let’s talk about the correlation between your advertising and your total sales, your creative, your AMC audiences. When we were able to go through the foundation, the whole purpose was so that a brand could then take those strategies and apply it to what makes the most sense for them. I mean, one of the things we talked about was a product launch and how you can view a product launch a little bit differently than your historical products and how you almost need to segment your catalog by strategy. So you’ve launched a few new products. How has that been different compared to maybe your historical approach?
Jason:
I think I’ve been able to scrape a lot of data. I mean, it’s different now because we’re further in the brand than we were at first, not knowing the difference of long tail terms to use. So we’re starting with more data at first, but I think sponsored brand has been such a big lift for us. I remember when you were telling me on the show early on, you’re like, I think you could get to 20 or 25%. At the time, we’re at 5%. And I think now we are somewhere in the mid-20s of 26% of spend. I did not understand. I thought it was, I was confused by it. I’d never gone in there. I was like, oh, this is a upper funnel. This is lead generation type thing and not realizing the power of a brand in even a low price point, like dog toy. So then pairing that with launch, we do have some ASINs that have been on for a while and have done well. And I think there’s a little more trust now when you see the new ASIN up next to things with thousands of reviews versus feeling like we’re just the new kid on the block with a single pane on a search page.
Destaney:
I love that. And I actually want to kind of take some time to toss that to the audience. How many people listening in are utilizing sponsored brand ads? Even to this day, I think I see a lot of brands have misconceptions around sponsored brands because the name of it is brand and Amazon portrays it as a brand building exercise as well. So you do think it’s upper funnel, but for those listening in sponsor brands, headline ads and videos, depending on what button you click, are still a pay per click model. That’s really important to consider because that means a customer has to click on your ad before you get charged. And if a customer is clicking on your ad, that means that there is interest in your product. So this is something that can be really beneficial to Jason’s point. When you’re launching an ASIN, you don’t always have the reviews, right? So customers don’t necessarily trust your brand. But when they see a product next to three other products that have thousands of reviews, it drives so much authority in the space. And one of the comments we just got is they’re not using sponsored brand ads because of a low-priced product. Jason just mentioned that he had a similar misconception. When you’re running these sponsored brand ads, are you running them with a similar ACOS ROAS target to your sponsored product ads?
Jason:
I’d say same target. I can oftentimes be more aggressive though, because they do convert higher depending on how I’ve segmented. I’ve just recently done a lot more of the audience utilization of the high intent audiences and being able to take some of the terms that have some volume that I, in the past, might’ve been afraid to bid in bidding wars on more head terms. That’s been fun to see that like, oh, I actually can play in that space if I target the right segment.
Destaney:
All right. You’re hearing it here first. We have a few other questions related to that. And Jason’s showing you in his direct brand experience that with his sponsored brand ads, frequently they can convert higher than his sponsored brand product ads. The main reason being is sponsored brand ads have copy. Sometimes they have images. If you’re running a legacy, they have videos and they’re typically shown next to other products, which drives authority. So to Justbreed’s question, is the ACOS for sponsored brands lower than SP? It can be. Now, not always because at the end of the day, it still matters when you’re looking at things like your bid or your keywords. And that’s where I think a lot of people mess up with sponsored brands. They go way too wide. They target way too many keywords, way too high of a bid at the end of the day. For our agency, because John’s also asking a question, our sponsored brand ads run at almost the exact same ACOS and ROAS as our sponsored product ads because that’s how we want them to run. So we optimize our bids in the same way. The ad format is very similar on the platform to a sponsored product ad. John, we have our own sponsored brand ads for products as low as $20 to $25. And that’s in a multitude of categories. The ad type is almost the exact same as sponsored products in terms of theoretically how it shows up on the page. There’s another question. All of our products are priced under $10. That’s actually a really good reason to run a sponsored brand ad because now you can advertise three products for the same price of one click. So that’s one of the areas we also recommend running sponsored brand ads. Jason, do you want to add a little bit more color to that as well?
Jason:
Yeah, I see one of the questions is what’s the product? It’s dog toys and cat toys and under $10. I feel your pain. Not a whole lot to play with there, but we’re $7.99 to like $13.99. So there’s not a whole lot there.That’s why I was afraid when my agency started wanting to do sponsored brand. I was like, oh, that’s not for me. But looking at my data, even since March, I think my ACoS for, not that that’s the primary goal here, but as a single data point, our ACoS on sponsored brand is 7% lower than sponsored product. So that could be a multitude of things, whether it’s the audience that we’re targeting within that. I think we’ve probably gotten very segmented, even like for specific dog types and breeds that convert at a higher conversion rate. So I think there’s multiple versus the sponsor products been more of a shotgun approach because you can’t really compete on anything but the term itself.
Destaney:
That actually is probably a pretty good transition for us. If you have been listening to Jason’s campaign setup strategy here, something that he’s mentioned multiple times is highly segmented and also audience additions. So for those who have been in the Amazon space for quite some time, you’re typically used to keywords. That’s usually how your PPC runs. You target a keyword or an ASIN. Well, we now have the ability to add audiences to all of our sponsor product and sponsor brand campaigns. One of the callouts that Jason mentioned is one of the audiences he added to his campaign is higher likelihood of purchasing. So Jason, this is actually kind of funny. I made a post on LinkedIn today because if you open up your Amazon account and go to your profile, and type in or go to your profile and select about you, Amazon has a new section where they tell you all of the information they know about you. Mine says I have multiple cats. True. I read extensively across multiple genres and I have premium cat litter brands. This is pretty interesting because what Jason was saying is that he creates his campaigns to target audiences that are going to be more likely to purchase. You might ask, how does Amazon know who’s more likely to purchase? Well, it’s because they know I am an absolute cat lady and you can see that in your Amazon AI right now. So when Jason creates these campaigns, instead of targeting everyone searching for cat toys or dog toys, he’s only targeting people that have a higher likelihood of purchase, which is probably me. And that’s one of those areas where he’s been able to increase his conversion rate is by adding those to his campaigns. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve been segmenting your campaigns and what really matters for you?
Jason:
I’d say a lot of testing. I got this really wrong when we broke after the season. Riding the high, sales are going up. I was like, let me test everything. I missed the whole control part of the test and how to make sure it didn’t go off the rails. So I can tell you how I did it wrong at first. And that was trying a lot without good systems in place to turn off things that don’t work quickly.So all protesting a lot, but I’d spent a lot in the month of June to the point of losing money on ads. And that was like a kick in the pants of like, wait, I got to do something different here. That’s where over the past couple of months, I’ve gone into the different audiences, some that Amazon suggests, some that I can create. And I’ve just been very conservative in my bidding approach to start with this, but I run it all through the using some of the MCP data for with Helium 10. And everything’s linked up through Claude that I get daily alerts on what I’m getting for new campaigns, no impressions, what might be needing to be paused or backed off. And that’s the piece I was missing in June because I came back after a week or two and I was like, oh my goodness, I just blew all that money. So now I’m going a little slower, but getting real time alerts. So I’m not having that wasted spend. So I think that’s allowed me to test a lot more because I’m not worried about it going off the rails.
Destaney:
I love that. That’s one of the recommendations that we like to make on our end is we like to view our Amazon advertising as you would look at your stock portfolio. And it’s really, what is your risk tolerance? For some of our brands, they want us to test and learn much quicker and they want us to spend much quicker in order to get the data to make database decisions. Some of our brands want to go a lot slower. So how we segment our campaign and build in those controls is really important. Now, one thing that was recently updated over the last few weeks is you can now add multiple AMC audiences to a campaign. Now they don’t stack, which I think is important. So you can’t overlap to identify exclusions. But what I think could be really beneficial for your test and learn is putting five to 10 audiences in a low bid, low budget campaign, put modifiers on each audience, and it might allow you to test all of the audiences at once and then decide what works best before moving it on to its next campaign. I haven’t quite decided if I’m a fan of it or not, but I do think it could be beneficial for just that use case.
Jason:
So how does that work from, I’m thinking of the data side of this, how I can tell what wins. I know we always do like single match type ad group campaign, but we can see the segmentation is good where you can see what’s winning and losing. Is that where you’re kind of up in the air on this is good or bad?
Destaney:
Yeah, that’s exactly. The way I’m thinking about doing it is identifying my top 10 highest converting keywords, putting them in a campaign, putting 10 audiences in the campaign and just judging what’s most successful by what converts the best and then pulling that out into its own campaign and expanding my keywords.
Jason:
Okay. Yeah. I’ve done really just single audience per campaign. Now there’s also not massive audiences. So some of them, there’s not a whole lot there to try to even target. So sometimes the pool is too small.
Destaney:
I love that. I want to ask a really quick question we have. How do I use the Amazon built customer base of highest likelihood to convert? So if you go with an advertising console and you go to launch a sponsored product or sponsored brand campaign, Amazon now gives you these audiences as a template. They’re already built in.You’ll see three to five different prebuilt audiences. One is higher likelihood of purchasing premium products. Maybe one is higher likelihood of purchasing within your category. And there’s a few others. You add those to your campaign and it works like a bid modifier where you can say, increase my bid. If my audience has a higher likelihood of converting, you can also then create your own AMC audiences with AMC, but that’s a little bit more technical for this webinar alone. Any other additions to that?
Jason:
I’ve used a lot of what’s been built there. There is a lot. And I feel like it’s blown up even since we had some of our first sponsored brand. I remember we had our first sponsored brand lesson and I sent you a message. It was like, did they just blow up collections or whatever it was? So it’s also always changed.
Destaney:
Within five days of recording that, Amazon completely removed the ability to add lifestyle images and collections, which is a whole thing. The follow-up question is, I have added them and I give them an extra percentage multiplier, but would like to learn about AMC. So Carrie and I did an AMC video. Maybe the Helium 10 team is able to link that. AMC really is the tool that allows you to build any of your own audiences. It’s really beneficial. All brands should have access to it. They have a lot of templated audiences within AMC. But again, this is something else that’s available within your ad console. It’s a little bit more advanced because it does typically require some knowledge of SQL, but the majority of my team has been able to completely activate on AMC using Cloud to write the SQL.So we’re in a pretty good spot. And if you don’t know SQL, there’s still quite a few templates in there that you can do.
Jason:
Most of what I’m using is the templates and I’ve tried some of the others. Honestly, the templates have performed better. So yeah, I echo that.
Destaney:
Love that. Now, moving on, speaking of the sponsored brands, you have been utilizing Claude, ChatGPT for a lot of image work. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like and how you draw a line between a trusted image versus too much AI? How are you finding that balance as a brand owner?
Jason:
I think it probably depends on the category and what you’re in, first of all. A squeaky dog toy doesn’t require the same trust, probably, as supplements.
Destaney:
Something you’re putting into your body.
Jason:
Yeah. I think I have a little more leeway than others might. But I look back and I’m like, okay, what did I do before? I paid someone thousands of dollars to take an image and then to do really subpar work that I would… Honestly, they were using AI too, that then I would have to do the edits for. Now it’s like, so we use Cloud pretty much for all of the MCP integration and the data side and the workflows. And then, yeah, a lot of ChatGPT for image work. I literally have a little light box. It’s two by two. And I take images from everything at every angle or video, upload that to ChatGPT, and I’ve replaced most of my main images. So my wife, pregnant on the couch three weeks ago, did that for one of our non-converting images. And literally the next week, the sales, it’s wild, went up 100% just from the image. And it wasn’t all that different. But just the ability, again, to test things. In the past, it would have been 2000 bucks that I would have sent someone and still done most of the work myself. And if it doesn’t work, okay, tell Chat to do something else.
Destaney:
I love that. And I think that’s a really, really big call out on the testing and learning aspect of continuously improving. It’s something that we’ve seen a lot on the AI front as well. If it doesn’t work, try something new, especially when it comes to advertising on our end. When we’re creating our sponsor brands’ video ads, oftentimes we’ll create maybe a cheaper, more efficient video in the beginning to test the placement and the keywords. And then once we see it successful, okay, now we can justify the investment into a higher quality. And that higher quality may not be a professional shoot just yet. To your point, it may be investing more time in utilizing Amazon’s CreativeX or something along those lines to help us optimize. But it’s just giving up on it. It’s really iterating the combination of what is your audience, what is the creative you’re serving that audience, and what is the, I would say, utilization. If it’s your main image, your store, or an ad unit.
Jason:
Yeah. And to that point, for the launches, we exclusively did the Lightbox, her iPhone, and AI, and then ran it through when we felt like it was decent. A couple of our best options through the Helium 10 Audiences. I was like, okay, let’s see. Do other people agree with these colorways or these options? And then got real feedback on it. And same thing with main images. So I think there’s a portion where we have good taste, but also let’s make sure that there’s not a strong bias. And does the customer agree with us?
Destaney:
We have good taste. I love that. Well, we’ve covered some of the big things on my list. I wanted to open up with, do you have any questions for me since we started this journey?
Jason:
And maybe we’ll get to it later. I have not even unpacked everything at Unboxed.
Destaney:
Unpacking Unboxed.
Jason:
Yeah. All of the latest. I mean, honestly, thank you for setting us up. If nothing else, the tools are great, but I think the mentality and the strategies is the biggest thing that I’ve gained from this experience. And to understand, I think I at least have the confidence if something is going off the rails, I know what it was. Before it was a Slack message to an agency that was like, hey, can you fix my TACOS? And all they’re going to do is like spend less. And hey, cost goes down, sales go down. But understanding some of the inner workings behind the scene has been the biggest win for us.
Destaney:
I love it. Well, on that note, we can talk about some of the Accelerate and Unboxed announcements. Overall, as a brand owner, I think the things that matter the most is Amazon’s trying to make everything more accessible. So whether it’s releasing the MCP or Seller Central plugin, these are really beneficial because it allows you to access the data much quicker. They launched full funnel campaigns. So with one button, you can launch a campaign that is considered full funnel. They have now integrated DSP accessibility to everyone and it’s called DBA. So display video and audio. So as a brand, you can now access all of these strategies that are much more upper funnel. My issue with some of these things is they’re missing a lot of context. Just because a brand owner now can launch on streaming TV with one button or DBA or access all of their data in Claude doesn’t mean they necessarily should. And that’s my warning label for everyone listening in is oftentimes when brands go and launch something, sponsor brand, sponsor display, DSP on their own, and it does not work, their immediate assumption is that ad type does not work or is broken. And I would really harp on that because I think some of those biases can prevent a brand from scaling. When in reality, it’s typically their targeting or their misunderstanding or their lack of context. I think that’s really important to consider now that everyone has access to things like an MCP with all of your Amazon data.
Destaney:
A perfect example I gave is if you go to your chat TV right now and say, what should I cook for my dinner guest? And it responds steak. There’s a good chance that 90% of people love steak. But what if your dinner guests are vegan? It’s going to be completely wrong because it did not have the appropriate context on your dinner guests. I’m seeing the same thing with brand owners utilizing MCPs and plugins. They’ll ask it things like, how much wasted spend is in my account? This is a tough topic for me because in my opinion, no ad spend on PPC is wasted because the customer took the time to click on your ad so they were intrigued. So it’s more what is less efficient. So there’s this huge context layer that’s missing with AI. So to your point on mindset, that’s the one thing that I’d really hit at. On the actionable side of things, one of the biggest updates I would say that came out of Unboxed is sponsored review requests. It’s silly, but Amazon is now allowing you to create an advertising campaign that requests reviews from people who have purchased your products. So this is cool because I think there’s been a lot of issues with Vine program, but also as a brand owner, it’s kind of a pain that you’re now going to have to pay for review requests. But when we’re talking about product launches, this can be majorly advantageous for brands. But think about how this could skew your PPC data. Now your tacos is going to look higher ad spend to total sales because you’re putting ad spend behind a campaign that’s for review acquisition. So going back to our point on naming an organization, I think that’s something that really matters. Andrew, it’ll be directly within ad console once it’s rolled out. It’s still in an alpha stage, but it’s literally under ad console. You create the campaign, you select your product, and you can request a review.
Jason:
Can I ask a question on that? I don’t know. When I heard that, I had mixed feelings. I was like, I don’t know if I love this idea. As someone who’s not a massive brand, it feels like it has the potential to squeeze us smaller brands out because to get 800 reviews, that’s a lot of sweat equity. And there’s a lot of brands that can probably buy that in a month.
Destaney:
Yeah, I felt the exact same way. But it’s also one of those things where we know the importance of reviews, so you almost have to do it. Now, how much do you put into it? Is it five reviews that improves your conversion rate? Is it 100 reviews that improves your conversion rate? That’ll be up to the brand. But I do think it’s convenient so you don’t have to utilize Vine anymore. So if you consider the cost of sending a free product to someone versus the cost of a campaign, maybe that can be a trade-off and maybe it’ll be more consistent on the review request. We’ll see. But there really wasn’t a lot of other actionable updates, especially for SMB, other than easier access. Now I think the easier access is great. Being able to launch a full funnel campaign is fantastic. But do SMBs really need that? I don’t know. Amazon is releasing branded conversations, which will be some level of AU optimization, I guess, for your listings.
Destaney:
And I think that’s important to know because, again, anyone who joined the webinar from the beginning, if you did that little test where, again, open your Amazon app, click profile, click your name, about you beta, you can see that Amazon knows a lot more about you than you realize. So imagine if I own a Pitbull and the person next to me owns a teacup, doodle, or something along those lines. Amazon probably can tell that distinction based on my prior search history. And if I go type in dog toy, imagine I have a customized search results with only larger, harder to destroy non-destructibles because I have a Pitbull. But the person next to me only gets shown products that are specific for them. This can be a really big benefit because now everyone’s conversion rate is going to improve because Amazon connects the dots. Where it could be a detriment to brands is if you’re launching a new product and you go too broad with your audience. Amazon doesn’t know where to index you. They can’t tell what differentiates your product. You’re never going to get any exposure because we’re no longer having a traditional search result.So when I say things like, Amazon is struggling in the discovery department, this is what I mean.Amazon’s really struggling to just drive discovery for new products because they’re only prioritizing the products that are in the top 10. And that’s where brands need to come up with ways to drive discovery, whether it’s TikTok or whether it’s leaning into video and creative on Amazon. I think that has to happen. Anything else on that front.
Carrie Miller:
I also have some questions for you guys. We are ready. I was thinking about as I was going. For Jason, how have you been using the MCP specifically for managing ads? What are some strategies and things that you could give to the audience that have really helped you since that has come out after Outsourced Optimized?
Jason:
Yeah. I think the first thing I did out of all of this was create some markdown documents of here’s the strategy and here is my brain from an ad perspective to give as much context as I could.Technically though, I think where I struggled initially coming out was not having all of that context represented well in my rules that I was setting up. So I didn’t automate them, but I think the rules were I just didn’t have everything. All of the ideas from where I would want to scale things up, but the math was saying it would scale it down from an ACoS perspective. All of that now I have flowing through not necessarily the Helium 10 ads rules management, but I do it all through Claude to have real conversations at each campaign. So it makes recommendations, but then I’m able to have questions about, okay, what’s the underlying data? Okay. I see conversion rate for the last 30 days is low. So you’re suggesting this, but what are you seeing for the last 60, the last 90? To be able to have more nuanced discussions other than kind of trying to do it by spreadsheet. So that has been a big deal for me. And then also just as our business has gotten a little more complex with more SKUs and ASINs and trying to make those matches. I have a dashboard now that I get on a weekly basis that gives me my true profitability and everything is perfectly mapped. It was such a pain before to get the cogs to always line up. And yes, this ASIN is a weird version, but it’s the same or the SKU is the same version of this ASIN and Amazon didn’t know it, or I didn’t update that in Helium 10. So just doing all that mapping back and forth, I literally every Friday used to take three hours of uploading spreadsheets to chatGPT thinking I was doing it a smart way. And now I get a notification on my phone and it’s pretty sick.
Carrie Miller:
That’s awesome. Okay. So what would you tell a brand owner who’s on the fence about bringing ads in-house from your experience?
Jason:
I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I was afraid of the unknown. So if that’s it, then the only way to learn it is to get in there and be willing to get your hands dirty. If you have that kind of mentality and you want to, I think it depends probably on your reason for outsourcing though. I had the time to kind of get in there and learn it myself. So I took it on. If I was managing five different brands or my role was something different and it was different than a solo entrepreneur, then maybe an agency would have made sense. But from where I was sitting, I didn’t see the value that our agency was bringing. I had lots of questions. It felt like I was looking behind their backs and trying to make recommendations. So I was doing the work anyway. So if that’s you, even if you end up going third party down the road, you’re going to be a lot better off for it because you’re going to understand what they should be doing. So I think that’s one of the big wins is even if you choose to stay external, you got to know it so you can hold them accountable.
Carrie Miller:
For Destaney, I think we were kind of talking about this before, is there’s a lot of AI functionality and a lot of AI stuff coming in and out all the time. How should sellers really understand or kind of determine what’s worth adopting and what’s not when it comes to that?
Destaney:
Great question.I think one of the best things about being an entrepreneur is you have the confidence to try new things. I also think that this is one of the biggest downfalls of being an entrepreneur. I have been in the Amazon space for, I want to say, eight years now. I’ve been on the agency side for five and really been running my own agency for three, three to six, depending on the timeframe. And in the time that I’ve been focused solely on retail media, a lot of our competitor agencies have transitioned to now being AI agencies or GTM agencies or influencer agencies, TikTok agencies. They never get traction. And I think that’s a really important call out because that is one of the issues with AI in the space.It causes insane shiny object syndrome. And when it comes to your brand, you really need to sit down and look at all of your priorities and say, hey, is AI actually going to move the needle? Or is it going to just make me barely better, even though it takes this much time and this much distraction in my business? I think if you get so caught up in everything you’re not doing, you’re never going to move forward. You need to get really, really clear, what is the biggest priority in my business and how do I need to move forward to make that change?
Destaney:
Now, that’s, again, my philosophical answer. The actionable answer is to get really good at, again, identifying priorities into crowdsource information, I would say. I would say follow the right people in the space who are absolutely the best at listing image optimization. Follow the people that are the best at PPC updates and then see what they’re doing with AI and how it can be implemented into your business. And the other thing that I would say is AI is often an operational shortcut. I would say that’s one of the biggest benefits of it, which is incredible. But sometimes operational shortcuts come with a cost of quality. You see it on the image side.You see it on all the tools that are releasing shiny bid optimization softwares, even Amazon launching full funnel campaigns. When you put fully automated side-by-side with strategic leadership in humans, usually the humans are still slightly better from a quality perspective, depending on what it is, more so when it comes to creative. So you need to ask yourself, is the money I’m saving by being more operationally efficient outweigh the output? I think that’s a big question everyone needs to be asking.
Carrie Miller:
Paul asked, I’d love to hear about strategy for money at a loss initially with ad campaigns to get ranking with the intent of slowing down or stopping the ad spend at some point. Product is $8 greeting card.
Destaney:
That’s a really tough price point and a tough category because you’re playing against Love Pop and Hallmark. We talk a lot about this in depth with both of our videos. I think Jason and I really dove in deep, so I highly recommend watching that series. At the end of the day, organic ranking is driven by two things, conversion rate and velocity. PPC affects both of those things. PPC can influence your conversion rate or give you an accurate reading of your conversion rate and also drive more units. So when you’re utilizing ads for ranking, you have to get really precise on what are your terms that you’re converting on better than anyone else. And then also what’s going to drive the most velocity is in positive ranking signals. And you create campaigns just for that purpose. I don’t really ever recommend stopping ad spend on Amazon. It typically doesn’t ever go well, but you can at least run it at a healthy ratio. At a launch, we’ve seen 50% to 60% TACOS, if not more, if you’re not doing anything else. I think healthy tacos for a high growth brand right now is anywhere between 15% to 20%. If you’re only on Amazon, if you’re doing media off Amazon, it can be closer to 7% to 12%. But really, I think it’s a question that a brand owner has to answer for themselves, and you can’t have a one size fits all solution on.
Carrie Miller:
I think you said he’s going to focus on raising AOV. That should help with multi-card packs. That definitely will help.
Destaney:
Yeah.
Carrie Miller:
See, this is another question. If we’re launching a new product for a brand, are there any recommendations to compete against products with lots of review, brand name trust? This would be apart from the sponsored brand products, I guess.
Destaney:
Sponsored brands would be the number one way, in my opinion. Sponsored products highlight your review disadvantage. Sponsored display is a major disadvantage because it also highlights your reviews. Sponsored brands video is probably the number one approach because it allows you to showcase your product and drive trust and showcase your competitive advantage, regardless of reviews. But Jason, do you have anything to add to that?
Jason:
I was just… I don’t know if this is good or bad, but I’ve tinkered around with Alexa for Shopping to find competitors from a front door perspective, as if I’m the customer. So I’ve looked at my pages and then asked it to compare. So if you were starting out with no reviews, no reviews might be better than someone who’s got 20, 50, 100 reviews with a one-star rating. So if you kind of look through the lens of the customer and how you can find those on the front end, I’ve used Alexa for Shopping and actually had some good product targeting campaigns that came from that search.
Carrie Miller:
All right. Well, I think that’s all the questions that we have for today. I wanted to also announce that we have something really exciting coming up. And just on the topic of AI, we have an AI bootcamp that’s going to be completely free for everyone. It’ll be living on our YouTube channel. We’re going to give out some skills that you can download from experts that are going to be in this AI bootcamp. Thank you again, Destaney and Jason for coming on and giving us this update. Really, really good news that everything’s going well. And we will see you all again on the next webinar. Bye, everyone. Thank you.
Destaney:
Bye.
Enjoy this episode? Want to be able to ask questions to Leo Sgovio live in a small group with other 7 and 8-figure Amazon sellers? Join the Helium 10 Elite Mastermind and get quarterly workshops, monthly training, and networking calls with Leo at h10.me/elite
Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast!
💰 Get Helium 10 with a special discount to start or scale your e-commerce business here: https://h10.me/h10
Want to absolutely start crushing it on eCommerce and make more money? Follow these steps for helpful resources to get started:
- Get the Ultimate Resource Guide from Bradley Sutton, Carrie Miller, and Shivali Patel for tools and services that he uses every day to dominate on Amazon!
- New to Selling on Amazon? Freedom Ticket offers the best tips, tricks, and strategies for beginners just starting out! Sign up for Freedom Ticket.
- Trying to Find a New Product? Get the most powerful Amazon product research tool in Black Box, available only at Helium 10! Start researching with Black Box.
- Want to Verify Your Product Idea? Use Xray in our Chrome extension to check how lucrative your next product idea is with over a dozen metrics of data! Download the Helium 10 Chrome Extension.
- The Ultimate Software Tool Suite for Amazon Sellers! Get more Helium 10 tools that can help you optimize your listings and increase sales for a low price! Sign up today!
- Does Amazon Owe YOU Money? Find Out for FREE! If you have been selling for over a year on Amazon, you may be owed money for lost or damaged inventory and not even know it. Get a FREE refund report to see how much you’re owed!
- Check out our other Amazon FBA podcasts including the Serious Sellers Podcast.
- You can also listen to the AM/PM Podcast on YouTube here!
