#479 – Taking Back Control of Your Amazon Advertising
Audio Version Above. Video Version Below
In this episode of the AM/PM Podcast, Bradley dives into one of the biggest pitfalls he sees Amazon sellers fall into: handing their PPC over to an agency before they truly understand how advertising works. That loss of control doesn’t just cost money; it keeps you in the dark on whether your campaigns are actually growing your brand or quietly draining profits in the background.
To prove it, he spotlights a real case study from the new Helium 10 Outsourced to Optimized series. Helium 10’s own Carrie Miller and Destaney Wishon from BetterAMS walk through what happened when they opened Carrie’s account: profitable campaigns randomly shut off, creatives that didn’t match search intent, and VCPM display campaigns that looked like rock stars in the dashboard but weren’t driving incremental sales. From there, they rebuild the entire strategy on the fundamentals: a clean campaign structure, SKUs grouped intelligently, 10-30 targets per campaign, and rules-based bid management tied to real business objectives, such as organic rank, BSR, and strict ACoS targets.
Throughout the conversation, you’ll see how a self-described “non-PPC person” can learn to manage sophisticated Amazon ads with the help of Helium 10 Ads and their Ads Academy training. Destaney shows Carrie how to utilize bid rules, keyword harvesting, negative targeting, and Amazon’s newer tools, such as Creative Studio and Sponsored Products video ads, without turning PPC into a full-time job. They also break down off-season strategies, what to fix when you’re getting impressions but no conversions, and how much of your revenue should realistically flow back into ads. The big takeaway: whether you keep an agency, lean on software, or run everything yourself, you need to understand the basics of Amazon PPC so you can keep partners accountable and finally take back control of your Amazon advertising.
In episode 479 of the AM/PM Podcast, Bradley, Carrie, and Destaney discuss:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 05:48 – Carrie’s Amazon PPC Agency Issues
- 07:19 – Carrie Learns PPC From Scratch
- 10:23 – Rules-Based Bidding With Helium 10 Ads
- 14:24 – When To Automate Your Amazon Ads
- 18:11 – Scalable Campaign Structure For Sellers
- 23:16 – Single-Keyword Campaigns & Dayparting
- 28:36 – Keyword-Specific Creatives & Creative Studio
- 30:54 – Off-Season Strategy & Fixing Conversions
- 33:08 – Sponsored Product Video Ads Launch
- 36:00 – Scaling Benchmarks & Ad Spend Targets
- 40:09 – Final PPC Lessons & Next Step
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
How to use Amazon’s new sponsored product video ads? The best practices for advertising campaign structure and bidding rules. How to take back control of your own advertising after outsourcing it? This and more on today’s episode.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to the AM/PM podcast. My name is Bradley Sutton 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 week I actually took four days off on a family vacation to Tahiti and disconnected from everything. But while I was there snorkeling with the sharks, I was still making money online. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Guys, there is nothing wrong with using an agency for your advertising. We’re inviting somebody who runs one of the best advertising agencies out there. But what we have found is a lot of people don’t like the lack of control, and they’re using agencies maybe before they should. In my opinion, agencies are great when you’re needing to scale. You know, like maybe you’re a one- or two-person team and you need to focus on other aspects of your business and you’ve been doing your own advertising for a while, you know what’s good and bad. You just like, hey, I just don’t have the bandwidth and I don’t wanna hire. Absolutely you need to hire an agency who can run things. But what we have found is a lot of people out there that as newer sellers even, before even having a full grasp or having full control over what Amazon advertising is, they’re going out and outsourcing these things to agencies and then they can’t even tell, hey, what’s good and what’s bad or like are they doing a good job or are they doing a bad job or I’m not, I don’t even understand what’s going on. What are they doing? You know, so we wanted to do a series.
Bradley Sutton:
You’re at Helium 10 where we can show you how to take control of your own advertising, whether you are just doing it in rudimentary spreadsheets or you’re outsourcing it to a consultant or to an agency and you had no idea what was going on. And that was the case of Carrie, you know, here at Helium 10, who has from the very early days been always outsourcing her advertising and she didn’t know too much. She knew the basics about, you know, hey, well, what is ACOS and what is Tacos, but she didn’t know the ins and outs. And so we wanted to take somebody from an agency who could teach Carrie how to take control of her advertising and go from having it outsourced to having it optimized because regardless, this should be something you should be thinking about. But for Carrie, this was especially useful because the agency she was using kind of like ruined her advertising. So she was like, I need to take control. So we are gonna talk today about that, but let’s go ahead and bring on our guests today. First, Carrie and Destaney, welcome. How’s it going guys?
Carrie Miller:
Hello, good.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, well, we’re here to talk about this series you guys had recorded over like months, you know, because this is not something guys, taking control of your advertising is not something that happens overnight or even after a couple of days. Oh, I know everything I need to know about advertising. So this was a process where Carrie was learning over months. Now, Destaney, my first question is to you, like when you first got into Carrie and her father’s account and kind of like, you know, took a look around, was there anything that just jumped out like, oh my goodness, what was happening over here? What was going on? You remember anything?
Destaney:
Yeah, well, I wanna kind of start by calling out one of the comments you had made earlier is, you know, I do own an agency and I wanted to participate in this series because as an agency, our job is to act in the best interests of the brands we manage, which means that we turn our way maybe around 70, 80% of brands that actually reach out to us for a very specific reason. And I think this was a bit of Carrie’s struggle in that your ads require a lot of context in order to be managed well. And that’s why it’s important for our brand owners to step in. There’s certain scenarios that may work for one brand, but not for another brand. And your agency needs to have the time to learn those nuances in that context. As a brand owner, that is what you are paying for, really is time. So whether you have that time yourself or your agency has the time. I’ve called this out specifically because something that a lot of brands see in the space and that Carrie and I got a lot of feedback from on the Q&As is their agency would outsource everything to a VA or their agency would never hop on calls with them and actually listen to the problems. Carrie’s ads weren’t just completely terrible, but what was happening is the agency that was managing wasn’t understanding the context of what Carrie was trying to accomplish.
Destaney:
Carrie had a very specific competitor come in, start flooding the market with crazy ad spend, which meant that her ads that had historically worked were falling further and further down the page because the competitors were spending so much, their CPCs were so high. So, I think that’s really important to open up with. There wasn’t anything just like blatantly, we need to fix this, this is absolutely terrible. There were definite key call-outs, missing sponsored brands, sponsor brands video, no strategic strategy around long-term growth. But the biggest miss was the people that were managing her ads did not understand her objectives as a brand. And that’s what you’re really paying for. And that’s why some agencies can be a little bit more expensive because you’re actually paying for the talent to understand your business as well as you do, which I think is difficult to find in our space. I’ll stop there. Anything to add to that, Carrie?
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I remember also, and I think this is an important thing to just, even if you have an agency, to understand how to find things within the console or just using Helium 10 to kind of manage a watch, because there were some really profitable campaigns that were just shut off for no reason. I think one had about 40,000 in sales, really low ACOS, was doing really well, and it was just turned off for some reason. Then there was also a lot of creative that was mismatched. So, like, you know, just not matching with the keywords, they pretty much put the wrong products in for the videos, for the wrong products. So, there were a lot of these things that were just like not attention to detail, but if you’re watching those things, you’d be able to see that. And then Destaney pointed out one, I think that was the VCPM. Is it VCPM? VMPM?
Destaney:
VCPM campaigns, yes.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, so basically these campaigns look like they’re doing super well, but it wasn’t actually what it seemed because it’s based on, it’s kind of like a defensive strategy where you put these ads kind of show up below in a display format under your buy box. And so anytime somebody goes onto your listing and scrolls down, it’s actually considered kind of like a view or an impression. And so you’re thinking, okay, you know, you’re getting all this great return for these ads, but it was actually really not. It’s good for like, you know, it’s good as a strategy to, you know, have an ad there to kind of do defense, but it was not set up properly in a way that would be beneficial for our brand. So, there were a lot of things, right?
Destaney:
I have a comment here, Bradley. I wish you would have quizzed Carrie or given Carrie a quiz on these topics. Cause the first call we hopped on, Carrie was like, I don’t understand PPC and I don’t know if I ever will. And now she’s hopping on a live talking about VCPM campaigns, which is huge, I think for her and for anyone listening as a brand owner, it does take time. It took a lot of time and coaching to learn everything, but it’s possible. And now that she has this foundation of education and knowing how to navigate, you know, software on her own, it’s pretty convenient because if she decides to outsource in the future again, she knows how to keep someone in check. She knows how to ask the right questions and that’s a really big opportunity for her to again, win her time back if needed in the future.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah. And guys, you know, we’re talking in Carrie’s context of she was using an agency and moved to do it on her own. This applies to other kind of like formats of just people who don’t understand their advertising. Like obviously Helium 10 has like an AI advertising, but I would not suggest you, hey, you don’t know anything about advertising, just go ahead and flip it on and just set it and forget it. You know, like this applies to many different aspects where we’re just going through the motions somebody mentioned, you know, just trying to use the suggestions from Seller Central and the education there and that didn’t work. So if you don’t understand the fundamentals of advertising guys, that’s where you have to start.
And that was the, you know, kind of like the core here. And that was always an inside joke here with Carrie. I’m like, Carrie, you don’t even know how to use our Helium 10 ads. So for years I was like, well, I couldn’t teach her Helium 10 ads without her understanding advertising in the first place, which she never had to do because she would always outsource it, which again is fine under some circumstances. And-
Destaney:
That was something that I think we did a great job of the series as well is we shared things live. It’s really easy to listen to a guru or one of us and, you know, maybe try to apply it. What Carrie and I did was actually walk through accounts live. And I would ask her, is this search term important for the wellbeing of your business? And she would say, yes. I’m like, okay, the ACOS isn’t great, but we don’t want to pause it. It’s an important search term for us. What would you like to do? Should we increase the bid and give us, you know, better impressions at the top of the page or should we decrease the bid because we want to focus more on profitability? That context and having the brand owner speak to that, one of the things that Carrie and I talked about is they had just purchased a really large round of inventory. That’s very strenuous on your cashflow. So we made sure to build that into the decisions we were making. So for anyone listening, we walked through that live. We talked about the context of when to increase your bid or lower the bid, when to create campaigns solely focused on BSR and organic rank versus when to pull back and focus on profitability because you need a lot of inventory to purchase. And that context is what makes or breaks PPC success in my opinion.
Bradley Sutton:
Rules is something that when somebody goes to software, becomes a little bit easier. I mean, rules, guys, when we’re talking about bidding rules or keyword harvesting rules, this is not something that only exists in software. Like if you’re doing spreadsheets, you have your own set of rules. Like maybe you make a formula or you just have a set of rules that you look for. If you’re just using Seller Central, you actually have rules because you look for certain aspects like, hey, where is ACOS higher? Where’s impressions lower? Where’s my row as this or that? Advertising is about rules. Now, the one thing that Helium 10 ads, rules-based advertising makes things easier is implementing those rules. So I’m just wondering, what were some of the things that you set, that you helped carry set up as far as if it was bidding rules or harvesting rules or negative targeting rules? How did that process work with you?
Destaney:
One of the most important things we did from the very beginning was talk about bid management. Bid management is one of the, probably the biggest difficulties to overcome because it’s not just math. Everyone wishes it was just algorithmic math, but how many people listening in have lowered their bids, logged into Seller Central the next week and realize that their sales have decreased 20% because they’re no longer getting impressions because their bids are too low? A lot of people. So, it’s a fine line between raising your bids and getting good ad placements and lowering your bids to focus on profitability. So that was one of the first things Carrie and I dove into was how to create campaigns for different objectives and then how to use the bid rules and even further the bid templates that we created to achieve different objectives. So, within Helium 10 ads, we focused on a few different areas that we realized were coming up repetitively. One of them is just maximizing sales and impressions. That’s a bid template. And the reason we focused on that is there were a few products Carrie had that had decreased in their organic rank because again, this competitor came in and just flooded the market and was spending so much that their rank increased. When someone else’s rank increases, your rank has to go down. That’s how a shelf works, right?
Destaney:
So, we create a few campaigns and then put bid templates that were focused on maximizing sales and impressions. On the flip side, she had a lot of campaigns where the only objective was I need to hit a 20% ACOS. So, when it’s really simple and your only goal is an ACOS target and not BSR or impressions or selling through inventory or launching new products, the math’s a lot easier. So there we used a bid template that allowed us to just set an objective for our ACOS and ROAS and do all of the math in the backend. That was kind of our key focus. If we were launching a product, we also have a bid template for that, but thankfully we didn’t do that as well. Headed into Q4, that would have been a lot of chaos. But the bid management, in my opinion, is the most difficult part because if you’re gonna do it by hand, you need to do it multiple times a week. It’s gonna take quite a few hours to do the math for all 700 search terms you had. But at the end of the day, you can use rules and templates that are gonna take all the heavy lifting off your plate and you can still be a little bit more flexible with them than maybe using a Black Box software.
Bradley Sutton:
Carrie, what was interesting for you to learn about the different rules for advertising that, I mean, I guess a lot of this was all new to you, but what especially, kind of like, you’re like, oh man, I can’t imagine having to do this on my own.
Carrie Miller:
Well, I just think, I think one of the things is like, you do have to kind of play with them a little bit. I think I kind of set an ACOS at first for a lot of things and then my TACOS kind of went out of control. So, there’s kind of like a balance when you’re first figuring it out. I think that’s the biggest thing. But also, yeah, you know, you get these kind of suggestions instead of having to go individually and do each one that would take forever and ever. But I think something I just wanna say is it does take a little bit of time to learn the bid strategies or bid optimization that’s good for your business. So.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me talk about the, on the rules. I’m just wondering about the cadence. So Carrie, just to give people a level set, about how much are you spending on advertising per month? Like to Amazon, what are you paying to Amazon? Like 10 grand, 20 grand, 30 grand?
Carrie Miller:
Well, this month is, so I kind of-
Bradley Sutton:
This month is a crazy month, I know, like in a normal month.
Carrie Miller:
Well, and then I kind of overspent a little my first month in like September. Like usually it’s around 20 to 20-ish thousand, 25. But I went way over because I didn’t, I’m still learning.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s fine, that’s fine. So I just wanna level set here. So somebody who spends about 20 grand a month on advertising Destaney, how do you set up like some of her rules and harvesting and things like that? Like for bidding, should that be a weekly thing where she’s adjusting the bids? Should it be every other day for keyword harvesting? Is that also weekly?
Talk about the schedule of somebody of Carrie’s level here. And then obviously other, let’s talk about if somebody is a lot bigger than her or a lot smaller, how that would differ.
Destaney:
If you’re doing it by hands, you need to do it almost multiple times a week, in my opinion. And you need to do it based on the data you have coming in. If you’re spending $10 a week, you don’t have enough data to need to optimize at that frequency. If you’re spending Carrie’s level, that’s really at the point where you need an automation to kick in because there’s just too much for you to do by hand. So, from an automation perspective, if you have your rules running, then you can hop in once a week and just very quickly, you mentioned harvesting. Hop in, see all of your keyword suggestions, hit the check mark if you think it’s good. And it already does the bid math for you because it knows your target ACOS. So it’s gonna harvest the keyword and put it in the appropriate campaign at the appropriate bid needed to hit your ACOS or ROAS target. I would say that one thing that Carrie and I did is we walked through and did the math by hand first. We actually, I wanted Carrie to understand the mechanics behind what a bid rule does. So, we opened, I would say probably what, 10 to 15 campaigns and we went through by hand and said, hey, here’s the math on how to adjust this keyword for a target ACOS. And once she started learning kind of intuitively when to increase her bid versus lower her bid, that’s when I said, all right, let’s go talk about bid rules because you understand kind of how to finesse it in the philosophy. And then the bid rule can take over. I think, you know, philosophies on timing is always a fun opinion. Bradley, you and I have talked about this when it comes to cart building.
Destaney:
I pulled insights actually this week for our agency. I was analyzing a brand does over a million dollars a month. The majority of their price points are around 20 to $25, low price point product, impulse buys. Over 50% of the purchases saw over a 60 minute delay in the first click of the ad in checking out. I think that’s really important because a lot of people are gonna get caught up with all of the science between, you know, hourly day partying and all of those insights. At the end of the day, what we’ve seen is customers don’t click an ad and check out immediately. So that’s a really big benefit. So, I think fundamentally, if you’re a brand owner, you can manage everything on your own knowing these insights of maybe only once a week is really what you need. Now, I think a fun conversation to have is when you start taking things to the next level, you know, Shane has a fun comment of like, Amazon’s become pay to play platform, not fun. I think that’s where things get exciting for me and we had a lot of fun conversations about because now we have things like AMC audiences. I taught Carrie how to apply AMC audiences to her campaign. Again, someone who’s never managed Amazon advertising before is now applying audiences to a campaign. So that was pretty incredible.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of campaigns, what should, if somebody’s taking over their advertising from an agency or from consultants, one interesting thing or from other softwares, a lot of different agency softwares, they have different campaign structures. Like there’s some out there that they like to do one keyword per campaign. You know, there’s others that were like, you know what? We’re just gonna have these mega, mega campaigns that have 200 targets in one campaign with $1,000 daily budget. You know, like for somebody of Carrie’s level, like did you have to change her campaign structure and like what’s your ideal campaign structure as far as like how many targets go in each campaign and how the structure works?
Destaney:
We didn’t have to change too much. We did have to adjust a lot of the naming and cleaning up. Some of the SKUs weren’t very aligned with the targets. So, there was a cleanup for sure. I would say if I’m going top down on just general recommendations, you need one campaign per grouping of SKUs per similar products, one ad group, and typically around 10 to 30 keywords in a campaign. Anything more than that, you lose all of your impressions.
Anything less than that, you don’t really gain as much for the operational complexity that’s added. So, I would say those are kind of the basics. And then the nomenclature, that was something that Carrie spent a lot of time on. Carrie’s actually working on a few projects to help everyone else understand nomenclature and naming structure as well. That part’s important because as a brand owner, you need to log into Ad Console and know how to navigate your campaigns. So, we really worked on, you know, if you’re applying AMC audiences, here’s how you add it. Here’s how you add videos, custom images, all those things that are gonna tweak your conversion rate, how to integrate them.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting, interesting. Let’s say you have 10 to 30 targets in a campaign, but, you know, maybe Carrie notices that a few of these, they’re just not hardly getting any impressions at all. What’s your advice for that? Like, do you then like maybe pause those targets in that campaign and throw them in a new one to kind of see if they get a little bit more play or you just let it ride in that campaign because you just figure out why Amazon is kind of like, just doesn’t think this is relevant or what’s the strategy there?
Destaney:
Well, the first thing you need to do is identify, are you not getting impressions because your bid’s too low? Your bid is the first lever you’re always going to pull. If I see one of my targets has, you know, a hundred impressions in the last week, I’m gonna look and see what is my bid. If my bid is 13 cents, that’s why it’s not getting impressions. It’s showing up in nowhere, Amazon. So I’ll increase my bid. That’s the first lever you always pull. If my bid is incredibly high, I’m talking, you know, $5, and I know it’s not that, then I will look at increasing my budget because it’s probably capping out a budget, you know, at the timeframe. Sometimes I will move to a new campaign if one of those or either of those does not work.
Bradley Sutton:
Dakota says, what would you say is the average people spend on a month? So obviously we don’t mean the number, but like the percentage-wise of sales, what would you say is a decent target or does that not exist?
Destaney:
I just pulled a ton of sellers on my LinkedIn a few months ago. The consensus was 10 to 15% for a mature brand. It was 15 to 20% for high growth brands. They’re investing a ton in advertising, trying to grow, grow, grow, is kind of that 15 to 20% range. Anything above 20% usually has organic ranking issues and or is a newly launched, not mature product. Anything less than 10% we typically see is either losing market share or that brand is spending more elsewhere on off-platform traffic that they’re then driving to Amazon. So they usually have a lot of branded search.
Bradley Sutton:
Kim says, I spend what Carrie spends and need more automation. I’m testing my first AI ads, but now I need to better optimize my manual ads with more chiseled. I like that word, chiseled.
Carrie Miller:
I like that too.
Bradley Sutton:
I’ve got rules in place, but they don’t take into account my profit targets at the SKU level. What would be a good rule template for that? Or should she make something custom?
Destaney:
Great question. So what I would do is break out all of your campaigns by SKU. That’s something that we almost always recommend. Let’s say you have $100 product and a $20 product. You’re gonna have very different margins for those. You need to put them in separate campaigns. And then it’s going to allow you to put your bid rules on each campaign with the different ACOS profitability targets you have. Say one of them, you want to have a 10% ACOS, one you want to have a 40% ACOS. You can apply your bid rules with those different target ACOS’s because they’re in different campaigns. So that’s the best way to do it. That’s what we recommend. We talked about this earlier. We also create campaigns for things like Organic Rank and BSR. We’ll put those in their own campaign and we’ll typically put higher target ACOS or ROAS because our goal is sales and traffic and not necessarily profitability.
Bradley Sutton:
Kim had a follow-up question. Same Kim, I’m assuming here, was one of these agencies that had one target per campaign, which sometimes it’s not necessarily bad or unless Destaney thinks it’s bad, but I’ve used that sometimes if I had a very specific goal in mind or some like hero keyword that I really need to keep control over. So, talk a little bit about that strategy when you would use a one target per campaign and then also hourly bid optimization and then how the Helium 10 schedules and day parting comes into that.
Destaney:
Yeah, of course. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It won’t hurt your account. It just adds a ton of operational complexity. If you have one target per campaign, you’re now gonna need thousands of campaigns more than likely to cover all your SKUs and most brand owners can’t go do that manually. You now need different bid rules and different bid templates per campaign, all of these things. And the problem is it doesn’t add that much value. That’s why I don’t love it. It’s way too much operational complexity does not give you that much more control. You know, I have seen multiple, multiple accounts that have came from agencies or software providers that run that strategy and it’s actually relatively detrimental because it gives you no control. You start forgetting where all of your keywords lie, what campaigns they’re in, you don’t know how to optimize unless you’re using that specific software. The placement modifiers are so, so messy on those accounts because now you’re trying to absolutely curate the perfect placement per the keyword and your bids are low and it’s a hot mess. That being said, if it’s my most important keyword, sometimes I will put it in a single keyword campaign if my sole purpose is ranking or my sole purpose is winning top of search. If it’s very strategic, I will occasionally launch single keyword campaigns because I only wanna win a certain placement, you know, top of search or B2B or anything with AMC audiences. That’s when I’ll start applying those because I need that level of control because it’s strategic.
Destaney:
The other thing is hourly bid optimization. Again, Amazon now gives you the insights that say a customer clicked on your ad on Monday and bought on Tuesday. You can get that anywhere. It’s readily available directly within your advertising console right now under AMC. And I’ve done the analysis on, you know, over $100 million in spend and what we see is that most people do not click on an ad and purchase under 60 minutes, which is pretty incredible because a lot of brand owners forget that, right? So, when people do use hourly optimization, what they will do is they will say, Monday night at 11 p.m. my spend is high, my sales are low, pause the keyword. What happens is their sales on Wednesday decline because what they didn’t account for is that 11 p.m. on Monday people are adding to cart but they’re not checking out until Wednesday, right? And that discrepancy between how customers shop is what makes hourly day partying not as beneficial.
Destaney:
Now, that being said, I’ve worked with many B2B brands who sell teacher supplies. We found teacher supplies do not convert as well on the weekend. They convert much better on the weekday, right? Maybe only homeschoolers are buying on Saturday, Sunday. So there is still opportunity to incorporate day partying but at the end of the day, ask yourself, how many times do you go into Amazon and click, not wanna buy? If a customer is clicking on your ad, they’re probably very interested in buying, that’s why they clicked in the first place. So, if you wanna find this out for yourself, Helium 10 actually offers day partying insights. You can only get it through certain softwares. Amazon Advertising Console does not give you hourly insights because it’s a certain API that only softwares have capabilities for. So highly recommend checking it out within Helium 10 before making a decision and then kind of remembering my rant I just went on, being very cautious about how you implement day partying.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, just real quick, I wanted to show people, people might be wondering what this outsource to optimize means. So this is actually a full kind of like course, case study, I guess you could call it, that Destaney and Carrie did and it’s available for replay in your Helium 10 console. So, where you can get to it is just go to at the top of the screen courses and then hit Ads Academy, all right? Once you get there, you will go to the Helium 10 Ads Academy where for beginners and anybody who wants a refresher, there’s a lot of stuff that Destaney recorded here a few months ago that are just the basics of advertising, but you can scroll down if you’ve already gone through this to this new section here called Outsource to Optimize and it’s an over the shoulder look at how Destaney was teaching Carrie from the ground up all about the advertising that she didn’t know about and then also how to integrate it with Helium 10 Ads. So again, if you’re a Helium 10 member, you have free access to this, just make sure to go to courses, Helium 10 Ads Academy and then look for the Outsource to Optimize. Now, Carrie, you had mentioned before or Destaney mentioned that you weren’t really or the agency maybe wasn’t utilizing sponsored brands a lot. What strategies did you guys end up utilizing for how you’re tackling sponsored brand ads?
Carrie Miller:
One of the things she taught me was to use, I guess take more time than an agency or big brand would and do creatives based on the keywords. So, for example, like for Coffin Shelf, if people are looking for Halloween decorations, you’re gonna do some sort of video or visual with Halloween decor with the product or whatever it is specific, it needs to be specific to what the keyword is so that people are more likely to convert. Like she used the example also protein for bodybuilders. Well, if you show a picture of somebody who’s like not a bodybuilder, that’s not gonna relate as much to somebody who’s searching for protein for bodybuilders. Whereas if you do a picture and there’s a guy with the protein shake and he’s a bodybuilder, they’re gonna be more likely to convert. So that’s a huge thing is that if you have the ability to do this, big brands are not gonna be doing it. And so you’re gonna be able to take the time to kind of specialize the graphics or I guess the content for whatever that keyword is.
Bradley Sutton:
What’s some advice, Destaney, that you can give now if anything has changed, which I think it has, that of how people should be using sponsor brands even more due to these new creative AI creative features that Amazon’s been releasing at Accelerate and Unbox?
Destaney:
Yeah, so Creative Studio is actually pretty incredible. Every time I see people complaining about it, I’m like, did you actually play around with it? Like our agency has seen some exceptional results and split test those results against professional creatives. Like creatives running on very expensive TV campaigns and they do really well. And it’s because of Carrie’s point. If you’re able to create a graphic that aligns with a specific audience, it’s almost always gonna do better than a professional shot commercial that targets everyone. So we’ve been using Creative Studio AI a lot. And the reason I do like Creative Studio, even though it’s not quite as exceptional as like Nano Banana or anything like that, is because the LLM in Creative Studio actually pulls all of the information directly from your Amazon listing and analyzes the category. So, to Carrie’s point, you upload your ASIN, it’s gonna analyze the category, find your competitive advantage and build an ad that is within Amazon guidelines and has all of Amazon’s typical recommendations. So that’s probably one of the bigger ones I would say.
Bradley Sutton:
Shane says, what are the best strategies for going into off-season? You don’t wanna waste spend, but you still wanna be visible so that you do not lose momentum when in-season.
Destaney:
Yeah, great question. I remember a fun conversation that was had on LinkedIn about selling swimming pools in Canada. Someone had said, you know, I really wish you could do geo-targeting with Amazon PPC because I don’t wanna sell swimming pools to Canadians. And I pushed back with, why are Canadians searching for swimming pools if they don’t want one? That’s the beauty of PPC and Amazon advertising. If you’re using sponsored ads at least, a customer searched and clicked. So ask yourselves, why are they searching for Christmas trees or swimming pools? That being said, we do typically see a decrease in conversion rate in off-season. And so what we typically do is, you know, lower our bids and adjust our creatives. So that way, if someone is searching for a swimming pool at a different time of year, it’s probably for a different purpose. So how can we adjust our creative to better target that person who may be out of season and preparing Christmas early, or, you know, X, Y, Z, all of the multiple different reasons that you could. An example is Christmas trees.
Photographers will typically buy Christmas trees early, early, you know, end of summer in order to prep Christmas shoots. So you could maybe adjust your creative to be focused on things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Margarita says, I’m getting a lot of impressions, no conversions. What’s some of the reasons of why that can be happening?
Destaney:
Yeah, the beauty of PPC is all it does is drive traffic to your listing. So if you’re getting clicks in your spend site, ask yourself, why are people clicking but not buying? It’s typically a issue with your offer, or maybe your keywords aren’t very aligned with your listing. Something Carrie and I talk about a lot in the video is our conversation around mason jars, right? If you are targeting the keyword mason jar and your listing is showcasing mason jar wedding decor, but someone is searching for mason jar for canning, there’s gonna be a drop off. So you’re gonna have high clicks, no sales. So make sure that the keywords you’re targeting are very aligned with your listing and your product detail page and improve your offer.
Bradley Sutton:
I know this is so new that this didn’t get into outsource to optimize series, but maybe we can make some content on that later. As a matter of fact, let’s put that on our to-do list. Let’s do an outsource to optimize thing on sponsored product video ads. But sponsored product video ads is something that was recently released at Unboxed and just has been trickling into people’s accounts. What has been your experience so far with that? I’ve been asking here.
Destaney:
I can answer two birds and one stone here because Sammy’s in the comments saying, sorry to say this, but AI creative is laughably unreliable. I’ve actually split test both. We have taken our AI creative and ran it in sponsored product video ads because our AI video was so successful in our sponsor brand video ad, it drove over $20,000 in sales and the click through rate was three times better than the account average. So that was with Creative Studio. It was incredible. It was actually advertising a bird feeder, a AI bird feeder. So it was a very complex video to build, took a lot of back and forth. We took that video, we put it into sponsored product video ads. Now the SP video ads are very limited inventory right now. So pretty much what everyone’s seeing is it’s showing delivery, but it’s only getting 500 to a thousand impressions. We’re not really seeing any engagement because we’ve only been able to spot it on a mobile device twice so far. So I think that they released an ad console, but they haven’t opened up the advertising inventory for it just yet, because it was too risky to put it in the search results during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That’s my assumption.
Bradley Sutton:
So for Carrie, who amongst many things has like, she has a lot of clothing products and socks and different things like that. What would somebody in the clothing apparel, or give us a preview. What are you gonna coach Carrie to do for getting to sponsored product? Like how do you pick what you’re going to target and how the creatives you’re going to make? Because it’s kind of a little bit different than what you would normally do for sponsored brand video ads.
Destaney:
It is, it’s pretty interesting because it actually takes your video and breaks it out into thumbnails. So the example they showed at Unboxed was using a product similar to like a GoPro camera. I can’t remember it was actually GoPro. You upload your video, you apply it to any of your campaigns you already have, right, anything that you’re already using from a keyword targeting perspective, you just add a video to it. It doesn’t show like a sponsored brands video, like you said, but it shows in a video that has thumbnails. And the customer can actually click what part of the video thumbnail they wanna watch. Maybe they wanna watch the durability. They wanna watch the video quality. For Carrie specifically, I would say, you know, it’s maybe durability and thread count or something along those lines. So it’s gonna create the video curated around those call outs you have. So I would assume that our videos probably need to be more focused on product features and call outs and competitive advantages rather than like broad storytelling.
Bradley Sutton:
Henry says, how long would it normally take to scale a brand who has been on Amazon for a year? I’m using an agency and they told me up to four years. You should be scaling.
Destaney:
I was like, what does scale mean? One of the things, Carrie and I talked about this in the videos as well is understanding what’s going on in your category. If you’re joining a category and all of your competitors are doing a million units a month in sales and you’re doing 500, it’s gonna take you a long time to scale and a lot of money to scale. So that’s why it’s so important to understand your category analytics. And Carrie and I dove into this. How do you figure out how you compared to the category? You can go into brand metrics, insights and planning right now. And you can see exactly how you are performing compared to your category. If your competitors are on average driving 30,000 detailed page views a month and you’re driving 70, it’s gonna take you a long time and a lot of money to scale. If you’re close to that, then you’re gonna do a lot better. So that’s the first thing dive into is kind of do an audit on your brand, going to insights and planning and then use search query performance, which is another thing that Carrie and I talked a lot about in these videos.
Carrie Miller:
There’s other elements that go into it too. Do you have enough inventory to go and scale dramatically? Can you replenish it quickly? There’s a lot of things that go into scaling a brand. And I’ve seen some people do it, but they have, like Dustin was saying, a lot of money. So you gotta just be prepared for a lot of spend if you wanna do it fast.
Bradley Sutton:
Here’s a question that I’ll take from Kim. Is Helium 10 ads tool has new suggestions for bid costs? How frequently do these update? Does the system use an average? First of all, I’m gonna say, I don’t pay attention too much and I’m gonna explain why. But in answer to your question, the Amazon suggestions, the Helium 10 suggestions, these are updated. It’s based on just the data that’s out there. That being said, the reason why I don’t pay attention too much to the suggestions, unless just to get a baseline of, if I’m going into something, a new niche and new keywords I’ve never targeted before, hey, is it $10? Is it $1? Of course, I’ll look at those suggestions just to get an idea. But any of you who are using Helium 10, the suggestions becomes a lot less useful because you’ve got more powerful things. Some of you are worried about placement, about where your ad is showing up, like if you’re targeting a keyword. And of course the bid affects the placement and the suggested bid, you’re hoping that you’re not wanting to get on page two for it, right? So use keyword tracker, all right, guys? So if you’re like, hey, is my bid enough? You’re gonna know within three or four hours, literally, like even if there was no suggestion on the bids overall.
Bradley Sutton:
So what you do is, hey, you’re targeting like these five, 10 keywords, put those five to 10 keywords in keyword tracker with the ASIN that you’re advertising for and turn the boost on, boost is that they’re a little red rocket ship or actually now it’s blue for some reason, like there’s no such thing as a blue rocket ship. But anyways, the rocket ship is blue. You hit that button and it’s gonna check every single hour in rotating browsing scenarios, that means different locations and different browsers where your ad is showing up. So if you’ve got this goal like, hey, I know I wanna be on the top of the fold, the top half of page one and you just throw in a dollar bid and the keyword tracker spits out, hey, for the last four hours, you’ve been at position three. You’re done, like, I’m good. Wow, that’s great. I got it right. But then all of a sudden you see position 44. Well, that means you’re probably like on page three. Well, guess what? Now you know, let me raise my bid because a lot of times the suggestions that you see in Amazon especially are not necessarily geared towards exact placement or like the top of the page. And so I don’t even care too much about the suggestions because I’m using keyword tracker. So I know exactly where my bid is showing up in the search results.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, all right, guys, before we close out here, I wanted to ask Carrie her final comments on all that she’s learned. But takeaways is at least educate yourself, guys. We’ve got tons of free education for Helium 10 members, this full course where you can learn about advertising and then also go through the steps that Carrie did as she was learning how to take control over your advertising, which we suggest. You know, like taking control is learning about your own account, learning about advertising, maybe before you go out to an agency or before you use software. Once you have an idea about how advertising works, now you’re gonna be able to be much better equipped with using a software like Helium 10 that can take something that might take, you know, 30 hours a month or 40 hours a month to do in Seller Central. Now it can be a one to two hour monthly task potentially. So highly recommend, you know, if you’ve got the Diamond plan, activate your Helium 10 ads, take the content so that you can learn how to do these rules that we talked about, how to do the day partying, how to do keyword harvesting, things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s why Helium 10 ads is out there because it makes things a lot easier. I’ve been using it since it got started four years ago. I have over 250 campaigns now that I manage in four different accounts using Helium 10 ads. So it definitely works guys, but only if you know what you’re doing. It’s not a set it and forget it. Hey, let me just turn this button on and everything’s gonna be fine. You’ve got to know how to make the rules. You’ve got to understand how to tweak things afterwards to make sure you’re profitable. You’ve got to like look at your keyword ranks that we’ve talked about. So this is something that we highly recommend doing. Now, Carrie, any last words of now that you’ve, after all this time learned about advertising, your eyes are open to what’s going on out there. Thanks to Destaney. Any last words you wanna talk about what you learned or what your goals are for the future, et cetera.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, just that it does take a little time to learn it and figure it out. So just be patient and maybe you’ll make some mistakes along the way. But I think no matter what, even if you’re not going to manage your own ads, that this is a very important thing to understand because you can help manage your own agency. Because if you just kind of let them run with it, then you’re leaving it all in their hands and you won’t know what’s going on. So I would just say, no matter what, learn ads, the basics at least, how you can really kind of monitor what’s going on. But I also, yeah, I think it just takes a little bit of time. So be patient and keep going.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Destaney, how can people find you on the interwebs out there and reach out to you or your agency?
Destaney:
Yeah, so agency is Better Media. You can check us out at bettermedia.com. But I think more importantly to Carrie’s point, there’s not a one size fits all solution for ads. I know one of the comments earlier was like, hey, this is a little bit surface level in the beginning. And the more specific questions started coming in and those specific questions matter because there’s so many different ways to manage your ads. And you have the context of your brand that I think is incredibly, incredibly important. So as Carrie said, educate as much as possible, check out all the videos that we’ve done. Check me out on LinkedIn. I post a lot of new updates there, but stay in tune so that way you can better manage your account, whether it’s with software, agency, or your own team.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, all right. Well, Destaney, thank you for all your help with Carrie. Thank you, Carrie, for being open to kind of like exposing how your lack of knowledge before on advertising and being open to go through this whole process. So everybody go in and watch the full series, Outsource to Optimize in Ads Academy. See you guys later.
Carrie:
Thank you.
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