#340 – How To Use Chat GPT To Supercharge Your Amazon PPC with Ritu Java
In episode 340 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Ritu discuss:
- 02:00 – Winning The BDSS Virtual Event With A Killer Presentation
- 02:20 – Ritu Java’s Backstory
- 04:25 – Selling Etsy Product In The US From Japan
- 06:10 – E-commerce Is Related To Data
- 07:15 – How Amazon PPC Dramatically Changed Over Time
- 12:45 – How To Find A Good PPC Agency For Your Amazon Brand
- 13:45 – What Are Amazon PPC Audits And Ritu’s Agency SOPs
- 16:30 – When Should You Outsource Your PPC Management?
- 21:00 – The Benefits Of Running Ads For Your Amazon Products
- 22:30 – Knowing Your Advertising Costs When Sourcing A Product
- 29:00 – How To Use Chat GPT For Amazon PPC
- 40:50 – Using GPT-4 Compared To Chat GPT
- 44:45 – Should Amazon Sellers Pay Attention To AI And ChatGPT?
- 46:45 – Common Mistakes Amazon Sellers Make On PPC
- 50:35 – How To Contact Ritu Java
- 50:53 – This Week’s Golden Nugget Of Advice
Transcript
Kevin King:
We’re back again this week with episode 340 of the AM/PM Podcast. This week’s guest is Ritu Java, the winner of the Billion Dollar Seller Summit Speaker Prize. That’s right. She was voted back in February at the Virtual Billion Dollar Seller Summit that I host as the best speaker by the audience. And she’s gonna be sharing some of those strategies that actually won her that award and a lot more in this episode. I think you’re gonna really find some great information, especially when it comes to marketing and PPC. Enjoy. And don’t forget it’s not too late if you want to come to the next billion dollar Seller summit, it’s happening June 11th to the 15th in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Just go to billiondollarsellersummit.com. You can see all the speakers, see the hotel, see all the information. Hopefully you can join us there.
Kevin King:
Ritu Java. Welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. I’m super excited to have you joining us today.
Ritu:
Hey, Kevin, thank you so much for having me. This is super exciting.
Kevin King:
I think the last time I saw you, I saw you in prosper. You were dancing the night away at a couple of other parties there at Prosper. But before that back in February, for those of you that have been living under a rock and maybe didn’t see all the posts and everything, Ritu actually was voted the best speaker at the billion dollar Seller Summit at the virtual edition with a pretty killer presentation. We might actually share a couple things from that later in this podcast for those of you that missed that. But it blew people’s minds. Ritu, you’ve been doing this for a day or two. I mean, you’ve been in the e-commerce, you’re not new to this e-commerce space. You’ve been doing this since like almost like what, 13, 14, 15 years? Something like that?
Ritu:
Yeah. So yeah. So first of all, thank you so much for the mention on the BDSS. I was like super blown away myself with the response. I’m glad this topic that I shared resonated with everyone. So yeah, a little bit about my background. I actually started you know, my e-commerce journey way back in 2010 when I was an Etsy seller. So I started on the Etsy platform and kind of realized pretty quickly that just because you have a listing doesn’t mean people are gonna buy your stuff, you know, so I had to kind of really teach myself marketing. I had to teach myself data at the time I was living in Japan, so, you know, it was kind of, you know, a non-English speaking environment and stuff. So I decided I would move to the United States and do a course in data science.
Ritu:
So I’m an engineer by background, but I wanted to go back to school and kind of get a little bit more deeper into data. I just wanted to figure this out. Like I wanted to figure e-commerce out. And then fast forward to today, I’m the CEO of PPC Ninja. We’re a software services provider in the Amazon advertising space. And I’m really pumped with, you know, any kind of data, data analysis analytics and all the new stuff all the great juicy data that Amazon keeps throwing at us. I love that stuff. And off late, I have been playing a lot with ChatGPT and OpenAI and just loving all the interesting things that I’m learning on a daily basis. Yeah, it’s just mind blowing how quickly this thing has exponentially kind of taken the world.
Kevin King:
Now so your background is in engineering, you said, you went to school in you’re originally from India, right?
Ritu:
Yes. I went to engineering school in India. I did my electronics engineering, electronics and communication engineering way back whenever. I’m not gonna say when that was, but yes, that was a very long time ago.
Kevin King:
Could have been that long ago. You’re not a day past 25, so it couldn’t have been that long ago.
Ritu:
Thank you, Kevin.
Kevin King:
So when you started selling Etsy from Japan, were you selling stuff into the United States? Were you like making handmade stuff and then shipping it from, or exactly like Japanese type of oriented things and shipping that into other countries? Is that what you were doing?
Ritu:
I was doing exactly that. So the Etsy back then was only on the us side. I don’t think they had other marketplaces. So, you know, at that time I was just shipping and the shipping costs were just killer. And I was trying to figure all these different ways of being able to send these light packages and, you know, kind of use the lightest, thinnest materials that wouldn’t destroy my jewelry because it was like so delicate. You know, I couldn’t use a box. I had to use like a bubble app and stuff like that. So yeah, it was a challenge. You know, and on top of that, you know, getting the visibility that was a challenge as well, you know, cuz I would say I’m setting from Japan and then they would say, oh, shipping costs and, you know, all that stuff. So then I started absorbing the shipping costs and that was not easy, you know, not fun, not easy. Yeah.
Kevin King:
Did you continue that when you came to the US to study for a couple of years? Did you keep selling on your jewelry on Etsy, or did you just focus on just the studies?
Ritu:
Yeah, I just dropped it completely. I just told myself, this is a new start. I’m gonna figure this thing out and then come back later. I mean, I never went back to Etsy at all. But I was more, now I’m more interested in Amazon than Etsy. So, yeah, I mean, the Etsy store is still there, and people can see my jewelry there, but it’s not, it’s not an active store. So yeah, I never went back to it. I have tons and tons of inventory. We do pick up inventory. It’s so many beats, so many different styles, so many different jewelry but it’s just laying in a box.
Kevin King:
So when you came and you went to school, what was it that drove you or that really appealed to you about e-commerce?
Ritu:
Yeah, so, because it was all related to data, right? So I was really understanding, trying to understand you know, how marketing works, how advertising works. And I wanted to do it formally cuz I had kind of gone through all the courses that were out there, like on there were so many people sharing their knowledge on Facebook marketing, Facebook ads, Google ads. I tried all of that in my own way. And then I realized that, you know, I needed better tools. I needed a better way of looking into data slicing and dicing it in different ways so that I could get the results that I wanted. And then just happened to have the opportunity to work at an Amazon selling account. And that’s how I got into Amazon, you know, so that was my lucky break, I would say. And then I just found that, you know, the ROI is so high, the conversion rate is so high on Amazon compared to all these other channels. I just think this was perfect and I just kept getting drawn more and more into Amazon. So I’m, I’m happy here, actually.
Kevin King:
So when you started doing the Amazon stuff, what year was that, roughly?
Ritu:
That was 2016.
Kevin King:
So in the 2016. So it’s changed a lot. I mean, your specialty is more on the PPC and the advertising side for Amazon sellers. It’s dramatically changed. Back in 2016, it was just basic. For those of you that weren’t around then, it was just simple, basic, easy. You really didn’t need an agency. You didn’t need someone that was a data scientist to do it. You just hit a couple buttons and there’s like three choices and that was it. But it’s evolved dramatically now and now it’s mind blowing for a lot of people. They just can’t get their head around it. They don’t like dealing with the numbers. And so they just job it out. How have you seen it drastically change in the last seven years since you first got into it?
Ritu:
Yeah, totally. I mean, the way you describe it is exactly how I remember it. So there was sponsored product ads, but back then they didn’t have ASIN targeting even they, you know, sponsored brand ads. We’re just getting rolled out. In fact, there was a hack that people wanted so badly just to get the sponsored brand ad placement, which was to sign up for Vendor Express. Back then there was this backdoor way of getting SB ads. And yeah,
Kevin King:
I remember of the guys at amazing.com did a special webinar or they charged like $147 and they had this, they, they had this special webinar and they got like 900 people to do it or something, some crazy number like that oh, okay. And that’s what the whole webinar was about. Here’s how to get to this competitive advantage on sponsored display ads by having this account that Amazon’s done away with. Now they don’t even have that account. And here’s how to sign up for it. It was, it was like, you’re exactly right. It was like a little ninja hack.
Ritu:
Yep.
Kevin King:
It was crazy.
Ritu:
Yeah, that was crazy. Yeah. And then we noticed, you know, the rollouts of so many different features, the sponsored display, which didn’t used to exist back then that was rolled out. And then, you know, it got more and more complex. I think sponsored display at this point is by far the most complex ad type with so many settings that, you know, all of those settings, if you didn’t set them right, could take you in a different direction. There’s, you know, vcpm campaigns, which are can be very misleading. There’s so many different things, right? So people don’t always know this stuff. Like recently I was talking to somebody on a podcast about vcpm campaigns and how they can be, they make, they may make you look like you’re doing a great job because the ACoS shows up as really, really low, but actually they’re cannibalizing your other sales, like you are already getting those sales through organic or through another ad.
Ritu:
But because this ad type shows up on the product detail page, and also the fact that Amazon uses last touch attribution this ad type gets attributed all the conversions that were going to happen on that page anyway. So how many people know this? In fact, barely any, I mean, I talked to agencies and they’re like, no, they’re fighting for this ad type because it’s making them look good. It’s making them look really, really good because their overall account, ACoS is looking really good. But we actually uncovered, you know, the, the problems with it, these were not click-based ads. They’re impression-based ads, and Amazon is showing that data alongside click-based, and it just can get so misleading. And these are subtle things that you either know it or you don’t. And most people have just too much other stuff to pay attention to.
Ritu:
And this can get completely you know, ignored, like the PPC knowledge, the PPC staying abreast of all the new changes that are happening in the PPC world advertising world it’s easy to ignore them. And you don’t know what to change, what levers to pull to, to grow your account. If you have really terrible profitability, oftentimes you’re frozen. You’re like, okay, now what do I do? You know? And then you turn to agencies and that’s how this whole, you know space with lots and lots of tools, almost 68 tools and counting, lots and lots of agencies came up because people don’t know how to manage their Amazon, how to tame the beast. So yeah, it’s a different ballgame altogether now.
Kevin King:
So there’s 68 tools out there for Amazon sellers to help them in some way manage PPC.
Ritu:
That’s correct. Yeah.
Kevin King:
I remember when there was none. And I think Brian Johnson or someone like that had one of the first ones way back when, and that space has completely, completely evolved. So if I am, like you said, it gets complicated. If I’m a bigger seller, I’m probably gonna either have someone on my team dedicated to that, or I’m gonna job it out to an agency. But the thing I see with people are always asking me all the time, like, who, what, what’s a good PPC agency? Who should I be recommending? And there’s a ton of them out there. Some have a better reputation than others, some but what I’ve always found is it’s not so much about the agency, is it’s about the person that you get at that agency. So I’ve tried several different agencies and I can say, this one, you should go with this one.
Kevin King:
I had a great experience that, but that’s just because I had whoever the employee was, or the rep was really good and on top of it. But someone else in that agency might not be as good, versus I could go to another agency and have a similar experience where maybe I get a bad one. I say that agency’s not good. So what do you recommend if I’m an experienced seller and I’m frustrated with my PPC, or maybe I have a current agency that’s just not performing the way I want them to do, how would you go about like, interviewing or tackling that issue of finding the right fit?
Ritu:
Yeah, and I will just throw in one more thing. So it’s you know, the person you get is one thing, but then you also wanna interview the process they use because people are only as good as the processes that they’re following. So if an agency is not process oriented, if they don’t have SOPs, if the quality of their SOPs is either bad or those SOPs are just not followed, then again, that’s another problem.
Kevin King:
So how would you know that? Would you ask them? Are they gonna share those with?
Ritu:
Yeah, we, we share all our SOPs so two ways to find out one get them to do an audit. And that’s one really good way of finding out what are the things they’re focused on and what they’re likely to be focused on once you give them the account. So that’s number one. So we always do an audit for all our agency clients. Now,
Kevin King:
What does an audit tell me? So you come in and do it just to explain this to the audience, if that’s never done one. Someone else is managing my PPC or I’m doing it myself. You come in audit, what do you tell me?
Ritu:
So there’s a few different things we do in our audit. Number one, we give you the account level insight, which is at an overall account level, how you are performing. Like people generally know, okay, my ACoS is this, my TACoS is this, my spend is this and my sales is this. But there’s other things that you might be missing out on. For example, what is your conversion rate on the ad side versus conversion rate on the PPC side there’s other things that people don’t always see. What is your sales coming from branded searches versus non-branded searches, or, you know, whether you’re using all the different ad types or not. So ad coverage, whether you are using your placement modifiers correctly, whether you’re using your bidding strategies correctly or not. Cause we go in and find specific examples to show them, where they’re using these tools incorrectly.
Ritu:
So we’ll point out a bunch of them. So we have this checklist, we’ll go through that, we’ll make our notes, and then we have a one-on-one meeting, and then we share the strategies after that even if we don’t have a positive outcome in terms of them converting they will still walk away with something valuable. So that’s generally how our PPC audits are structured. And we also do a little bit of a light audit on the retail readiness side of things, because without retail readiness, if someone tells you that you have 2% conversion rate on your unit session percentages, and we can do a great job on PPC, I think that’s a big lie. And so if an agency doesn’t know the difference you know, if the page isn’t converting and you’re pushing more money onto that page and the conversion rate is so poor, you’re not gonna succeed with PPC.
Ritu:
Something that’s not working needs to be fixed first. So all these things can be pretty well explained if you are having an audit and you’re talking through all the numbers there. So you look at the numbers, you look at the strategies that they think they will use to, to counter all the flaws that they’ve, they’ve noticed, you know, it can’t be just a general statement. It has to be like, more specific, like, what exactly are you gonna do? And then you can also look at their SOPs. So we actually have a Trello based SOP system for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. We have a list of things we check on on a regular basis, and we happily share that if they ask for it. You know, if they say, okay, what’s your SOP? We’ll say, here it is.
Kevin King:
So what level should I be looking to job out my PPC? Is it, should I wait till I hit a hundred thousand dollars? I am new seller and I should I start right away with it with an agency? What, what do you recommend that people do when it comes to managing their PPC? So should they learn it in the beginning? Like if you’re just starting out and you put in $10,000, should I just kind of try it myself just so I kind of basically understand the, the jargon, the terminology before I job it out so I can have intelligent conversations with somebody? Or what would be your approach and recommendation for a brand new person? And what level should they consider switching it over to an expert that does this day in day out?
Ritu:
Yeah, so I’ve seen people you know, on both sides of the spectrum, people who are brand new who just don’t understand where to start. They’re like afraid of the whole PPC thing. And we often help them in the early phases, and then we hand the account back to them. So let’s say they just need help understanding, you know, how do I run, how do I even start? You know, where do I start? You know, we help with setting up their campaigns and structures and basically teaching them some good best practices right in the beginning of their journey. Cuz they’re gonna use PPC forever, they’re not gonna ever drop it. So it’s kind of nice if you are a, you know, brand new seller to learn PPC on your own. But if you need help and you need it like yesterday, then you might as well speak to an agency who will do like the initial setup and teach you the basics.
Ritu:
You know, just do it with them for a couple of months and then take a break. See if you can handle it yourself, you know learn the ropes. And then once it gets, you know, too big to the point that it’s affecting your other work, like if it’s taking you away from managing the rest of your Amazon account, then definitely at that point start looking out and let someone else manage it. Now, of course, the value has to be there, right? They have to be able to pay for themselves. If they can’t pay for themselves at that stage, initially, of course they won’t be able to pay for themselves because you are also not selling. But once you’re a mature seller and you want this agency to be able to pay for themselves and be incentivized to grow and give you profits then at that point, you know, it’s probably a, a good idea to go ahead.
Ritu:
The other thing I would also recommend is that, you know, if an agency has a software that they’re using, then also evaluate the software, because a lot will depend on how the software works. And sometimes the software could, you know, could basically be doing all the work in terms of like AI or whatever, and the agent or agency is me merely setting some parameters there and maybe not working so much on the creative side of things, because I think that PPC has two aspects. One is the you know, daily, weekly management stuff like bid management, budget management placement management, bidding, strategy management. These are all, you know, better suited for software. They’re the kinds of things that software can do a lot better than humans because it’s volumes and volumes of data.
Ritu:
And the other side of PPC, in my opinion, is the creative side of things. You know things that involve keyword research or competitor research or finding out which keywords you should be going after. Where is the low hanging fruit? Like which ad types are gonna give you the best results now? What is the, the earliest you can get onto some sort of beta that Amazon is running? Like right now, there’s this amazing beta with video ads that not a lot of people have caught on, but I suppose by the end of this episode, people would be using that given how many downloads you guys have. Yeah, so there’s just a lot of those creative things, even thinking through what kind of sponsored brand headline ads we should run, et cetera, et cetera. That’s, I think, better suited for human work. Like humans can do a lot better on those aspects. And I think you sh anyone who’s looking for an agency should, should try and figure out what is the balance between those two aspects.
Kevin King:
So Amazon’s become much more of a pay to play platform. I mean, I remember back when 2016, when you first started, it was back then it was about 80-85% organic sales and maybe 10, 15, maybe 20% PPC. That’s what would you say it is across a lot of your clients now? Is it, is that, has that flipped? What are you seeing as far as the mix and the ratio that a healthy account is maintaining?
Ritu:
Yeah, it hasn’t exactly flipped. I mean, it is definitely going more towards PPC. But the way I would put it is if you are a new wish seller, let’s say between two to three years on Amazon, I would consider that kind of newish. I think the ratios are more on the side of PPC versus organic. Whereas if you’ve been in the game for a while, like eight years, nine years, and so on you will see that your organic is still the bulk of your sales. And the reason is because, you know, gaining relevancy for keywords does take time. You can’t just make it happen. Even with brute force, even with like giveaways, even with lightning deals and so on, it takes a lot of time a lot of credibility and, you know, Amazon’s algorithm needs to pass you as someone who is you know, consistently delivering results. And so you build that credibility over time. And those are the accounts we see with maybe 30 to 40% coming from PPC, and the remaining 60 to 70% coming from organic. All the newer accounts that we are seeing, like two years, one year, two years, three years, maybe 70% of their sales would come from PPC and about 30 from organic, because they’re still trying to build up their relevancy and it’ll take time.
Kevin King:
That’s something that maybe a lot of newer, or like you said, the sellers who’ve been selling less than three years, they may not take into consideration how much is actually they’re gonna have to spend to get that placement. So is there. I know people always say, what’s a good TACoS or what’s a good ACoS? And that just, that depends. I mean, there’s not one set number for everybody, but what is just kind of like a basic rule of thumb that you would say someone at that level should just figure that, that you just need to maintain? I mean, I know the target for a lot of people is like, try to get under 10% TACoS. That seems to be like a common just like target threshold, which may or may not make ca make sense in all cases, but what would you say is, should people be striving for and looking for? And a lot of this has to do with the sourcing too, because you gotta source products that have enough margin that you can cover this. And a lot of people forget that. They just look at their landed costs and they totally forget about baking in a number for for advertising. And what would you say someone just, if they’re doing back of the paper math or napkin math, they should throw in for that number?
Ritu:
Yeah, absolutely. In fact you know, I shared a TACoS formula recently at prospered, one of my talks there. What we realized was that initially when you are just starting out as a new seller you will notice that your ads would eat into your profits, right? You’re basically starting from scratch. You don’t have any visibility. You don’t have any way of getting people to choose you over your competition. So you have to go heavy on ads. That’s kind of the only way you have. But then as you go over time you will see that when you start spending more and more on ads that your relevancy, the keyword relevancy starts to build up, and then your revenue starts to go up as well, right? So it’s almost like imagine two vertical axes and one horizontal, for the horizontal is the ad spent over time.
Ritu:
And the left one let’s say, is your profits. And the right vertical axis is revenue right, overall total revenue. So what happens is that in the initial phases, your profits curve looks like it’s going from high to low, right? Your ads are eating into your profits, your profits actually decreasing, but then simultaneously your revenue is increasing. And there is a sweet spot in between where for the right amount of spend, you get the right amount of sales. Like any imbalance on that will either cause you to have a higher or lower TACoS, right? So the TACoS value itself cannot be an absolute number. It has to change with your growth as a seller. It has to be different at different stages of your growth on Amazon. So initially your TACoS would be much higher till you get to that sweet spot where actually revenue starts to take off.
Ritu:
And you know, at that point you can start to push, you know, pull back on your TACoS targets and start to make it a little bit more conservative, right? As you were saying, 10%, like 10% is not a number that I can say is the absolute, cuz I don’t think we can give out absolute numbers. Even after you’ve calculated your COGS and all that stuff and your overheads, you will see a variability, a variability in your taco setting, right? So that’s something that’s gonna change over time. So just be aware of that. But then there is a rule of thumb, the rule of thumb is that eventually you wanna get to this is what I normally tell people is that you wanna target at least half of your net margin. So whatever is left at the end of the day, after, you’ve paid off Amazon and your suppliers and everything, your overheads, whatever you’re left with and you wanna obviously take something back home as well. So try to target about 50% of that as your TACoS gold eventually.
Kevin King:
So if your net margin is 30% without advertising in there, then you should bake back in a 15% spend on, on TACoS, and then that would put, put your net once you put that column back into the PnL at 15% as as your bottom line that you’re reinvesting or taking, paying yourself out on or, or whatever it may be.
Ritu:
Exactly. Yeah.
Kevin King:
So if I’m starting out as a new seller and I’ve got $10,000 to launch my product, I might need to actually either change what I’m launching or I might need to actually say, I need another $10,000 just in PPC because I gotta buy my way in. Something along those lines. I mean, that’s something a lot of people don’t think, or if they have $10,000, I’m like, okay, I got 5,000 that may have to be spent on PPC just to get positioning and the other 5,000 is what I have to actually buy my product and launch it and everything with. So that’s a different way of approaching it than what’s been done in the past.
Ritu:
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think we need to keep money aside for PPC because it is going to be 60 to 70% of your total sales, like you will have to spend. And most people do spend like 80% TACoS, not TACoS, ACoS. So then you can do the math there as well. How much you will be spending and how much you will be gaining at the end of the day. And that could continue for months even, you know, six months, seven months till you build relevancy. Now, obviously, how you play the game will also decide the outcomes, right? How you pick your keywords, which you know, which niche to go after, whether you’ve done your competitor research enough, whether you understand what you’re going up against, you know, is how fragmented is the market?
Ritu:
Is it just being occupied by two or three leaders? And you can find that out through product Opportunity Explorer, by the way. You can look up trends and you can see two things. You can check price points, average price points for a keyword, and then you can also check not for a keyword as in how much you pay for keyword, but average price point of products that are winning that keyword. You can find that out and you can find out how many competitors are winning that keyword. So those are two pieces of information that can tell you how you should go about, you know, planning for the right product and then also the right keywords because all of this in the end, will come back all together.
Kevin King:
So how is ai, that’s the buzzword right now, and since November of last year when ChatGPT 3.5 was actually released, some people started latching onto it, and especially in our space, and let’s help it rewrite our listings and analyze reviews and help us with the title. And especially if we’re not a native English speaker, it can make a huge difference. But you’ve taken it to like another level beyond that and actually are using it with PPC now. And you also, like at the billion dollar seller summits, the presentation that won the whole thing, you shared like 10 ways to actually use AI to actually analyze big data sets of PPC and write that out to a customized Google doc without really knowing any kind of programming, without having to know, get a bunch of developers involved or anything. It was mind blowing. And I know that’s just the beginning. It’s just you know, this is gonna shoot to the moon on what’s happening now with ChatGPT 4.0. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re seeing AI’s impact on everything, but specifically on Amazon sellers and their advertising, and maybe share with us a few insights on that?
Ritu:
Yeah, absolutely. So you’re right, I mean, around late December, early January when this thing just blew up and everybody had access to what was, you know much dissipated people on their wait list and stuff like that you know, I started playing with AI and I started looking at what can be done with AI? Can we use it for advertising? Cuz I’d already seen some case studies of people saying, okay, we’re analyzing listings, we’re analyzing reviews, we’re getting more ideas on how to, you know, change our, our product or product descriptions and so on. So there was a lot of those kinds of use cases because ChatGPT is really good at language models. They, they really understand you know, words and it’s, it’s easy for ChatGPT to process a lot of text and give you summaries, give you alternatives, give you analysis of what’s been said.
Ritu:
It can also look for, you know, patterns across different text pieces and give you the best out of all of that. So I think those use cases are quite well understood. Now, I guess everybody started using you know, those ideas to optimize their titles and bullet points and so on. Now, obviously ChatGPT is not perfect because it will sometimes give you some random responses, which you’ve gotta filter out, and then there’s this whole idea of like writing the correct prompt so that you get the right sort of response that you’re expecting. So yeah, I was just playing with all those things and then I said, okay, how do I apply this to PPC? Like, how do I get ChatGPT to be my buddy, you know, so I can do more with PPC.
Ritu:
And so you know, I already have like this you know kind of affinity for Google Sheets. Like I already was doing a bunch of stuff with Google Sheets but this kind of accelerated it even more so we started experimenting using ChatGPT and Google Sheets together and kind of use that exponentially increase our productivity and the outcomes. So yeah, at BDSS, I had kind of shared some ideas on how I just told myself, okay, I’m gonna create 10 tools in 10 days. You know, the idea of being that you can create mini tools like mini or micro tools so many of them for the smallest thing that you wanna analyze with your ad data, right? There’s reports that Amazon gives you lots and lots of reports that you can take slices off and say, okay, I wanna analyze this part of the data over time.
Ritu:
How do I do it right? So you can use ChatGPT to come up with suggestions on how this data can be utilized. And the way I eventually kind of boil it down to like four different ways to interact with ChatGPT I’ll share them. So the first one was basically asking ChatGPT directly. Look, for example, I say, okay, here is my product this is my product description. I wanna find keywords that the audience of this product is likely to use in order to search for it. So I’m asking ChatGPTs opinion based on whatever information it has from the worldwide web up until I think September 2021. That’s the, the brain of ChatGPT and use that to come up with starting points for keywords.
Ritu:
That was like one experiment I did in early on and I said, wow, this is great because it gives, gives me as many keywords as I want. Now, obviously, you wanna pair that up with tools, right? To get the search volume because just having keywords alone isn’t sufficient. So I started pairing that up with Helium 10 because I know that magnet can give you search volume if you provided a bunch of keywords, like up to 200 keywords can be entered into magnet, and then it gives you search volume, which is great. Cuz that was a perfect kind of pairing of an initial idea with a tool that already existed. And then I just export that information out and use it, you know, to, to do the next steps. Another way, so this was asking ChatGPT directly in the UI in the ChatGPT UI.
Ritu:
Another thing I started playing with was asking ChatGPT for Google Sheets formulas, which are super useful, but not everybody knows them or remembers them. Like, I’m a heavy Google Sheets user, but if you ask me what’s the formula to extract blah, blah, blah out of something else, I’ll probably have to Google it myself, right? I’ll be like, okay, what was the syntax again? I know it’s, it’s doable, but I don’t remember it, right? So at that point, instead of going through Google search engine and then going through Stack Overflow to give you the exact formula and then trying it and so on, all you need to do is tell ChatGPT exactly what you want in your Google sheet in terms of outcomes, you wanna say, I have a sheet A that does this, it’s got this on column A, it’s got this on column B, and it’s got this on column C, and I want another sheet which I’m gonna name blah, blah, blah.
Ritu:
And I want you to tell me how is it doing month over month? Something like that. So I asked ChatGPT to give me the formulas to add, and it told me exactly which cells to add, what formulas to which is mind blowing because my whole productivity was 10Xed. Like, I, I didn’t have to do any searching any experimenting. I just used the formulas as is. And sometimes those formulas would work and sometimes they wouldn’t. So when they didn’t work, I would just throw it back at chat PT and say, that didn’t work, gimme an alternative. So it says, no problem. And it also apologizes, I apologize for the confusion. And then it gives you an alternative. Try this filter formula or try this index array formula, which I would never be able to dream up even if I spent an hour or two just trying to, you know, figure the formulas out on Google Sheets.
Ritu:
Anyway, so, so that was the second way I started experimenting and I started creating these micro tools using Google Sheets formulas that did all kinds of things. Then the third way that I interacted with ChatGPT was to say, give me code. And that was the point at which I was like, okay, this is beyond my ability. Like, I do not I’m not, I don’t identify as a programmer although I know the basics of logic and programming, et cetera from engineering days, but I’m not a programmer. So for me to come up with any kind of code is close to impossible, right? On my own I can’t do it. So I ask ChatGPT to give me Google app script formula for, or just gimme Google app script code that I would then insert into Google, and then it would, you know, do whatever it needed to do.
Ritu:
And this was amazing because it literally spits out the code and then you copy the code and you put it as part of your Google Sheets extension. You just say app script, and you drop the code in there, and then you’re off to the races. Now, it will also have just like any programming softwares, it will throw errors, right? There will be things that you need to debug, just like bulk files on Amazon, right? Often you get errors, then you need to debug them. And so what I was doing was, I was just copying the error messages and throwing it back into ChatGPT as is without saying anything. And then it would say, oh, I apologize, this area is because of blah, blah, blah. Let me give you another piece of code. So it would give me another piece of code or fix something in my previous code.
Ritu:
And I, I was able to create a bunch of really cool PPC tools just using the suggestions that ChatGPT threw up for the app script code. I mean, in between it was also giving me Python, which I was like, okay, should I do it in Python? Should I do it in Google App Script? Okay, let’s just try Python. So I also downloaded Python and ran it on my local machine, and I was able to get good results with that as well. So it’s interesting that chat g PT can take a few instructions and then turn that into something that you can use right away. You know, you can create mini tools, micro tools, so many of them, sky is the limit. I created 10 tools in 10 days and I kept going.
Ritu:
I’m like, okay, I’m gonna create more tools, I have a bunch of them now. So that was the third way I, I was interacting with ChatGPT. And the fourth way is basically to integrate it right into Google Sheets. So for this you know, basically you need to get a little bit of help which our developer was able to help us. So with a little bit of help, you can get the formulas working within Google Sheet so that if you put in a prompt, you will get a response in another cell and you can basically drag down the formula across all the roles and do this at scale. That was amazing cuz then I was like, okay, let’s say if I wanna create 1000 sponsored brand headline ads today for these 1000 keywords, can I do it?
Ritu:
And boom, it’s easy. Like in a matter of minutes, I had 1000 sponsored brand headline ads that can just be used right away with some tweaks, maybe because sometimes it doesn’t obey your command. Like I keep saying don’t use exclamation marks, but it’s still some exclamation marks. But anyway, you get the idea. So there’s four different ways in which I was able to evolve myself and also use ChatGPT in more and more advanced ways. So now we’ve just, you know, adopted it as the thing we do, we just go to the sheet and just put in a prompt and then it gives you a reply and it stays there. The whole sheet, the whole team can use it and so on. It’s pretty cool. What
Kevin King:
Differences are you seeing in a lot of this that you did for, like the BDSs was in ChatGPT 3.5, but since then four point ohs come out and you’ve started dabbling in that. Are you seeing a big difference or any differences at all in that?
Ritu:
Yeah, I think ChatGPT 4.0, Which is the backend that is integrated with our Google Sheets solution is a little more advanced, actually quite a lot more advanced. It’s still in the text format but I believe more is coming, like I believe you will be able to now upload images and things like that and interact with ChatGPT provided. There are some interfaces that take it, so I’m just playing with the text version of it right now. So there are some changes and I can explain a few of them. So for example, there’s one new addition where you can set the persona of the person you think ChatGPT should be when answering the question. So it’s from the perspective of who for example, you can say you are a helpful assistant, or you are an engineer, or you are a model or whatever from that person’s perspective, answer this question, you know?
Ritu:
So that makes a whole lot of difference because then it’s more kind of catered to the kind of response you’re hoping for. That’s one persona is new and ChatGPT 4.0. Then there is this thing called facts. Earlier we didn’t have facts. Facts basically is you giving ChatGPT you know actual facts that it should use. You know, because it doesn’t know everything like it does not always understand and it can get mixed up with facts versus interpretation. So you can actually give it some specific facts and that’ll help give you a much better, it give you a much better response. Another one is temperature, which has been around since ChatGPT 3.5. So temperature is basically trying to moderate the output creativity level, which means how random can it be or how deterministic can it be, you know?
Ritu:
So the more creative you want the responses, the higher you set the temperature the lower you want the creativity level, and you just want like deterministic responses with nothing deviating, then you can set the temperature to a lower value. And then finally, another kind of change, which I think was kind of cool, was it’s called Top P which is something called nucleus sampling. And this is basically the idea that if you say, I want my Top P variable to be, let’s say 0.1, it means that the responses that ChatGPT will consider is only 10% of the probability, which means they’re highly catered to you know, giving you a response that is most likely to be true. So there’s that, I mean, Top P and temperature can be used alternatively.
Ritu:
You either use one or the other. But basically the idea is how deterministic do you want the response to be versus how creative. And I know that people right now are, you know, testing the limits of chat by giving it like crazy prompts and wanting crazy answers as well. But yeah, you can control some of those parameters by setting these variables especially if you’re doing it through a Google Sheets integration. You can have a separate sheet just telling you what these values are or telling to ChatGPT what these values are so that it picks those up and then applies it to your prompts. So yeah, there’s a lot, like, it’s still evolving, but there’s so much so much to learn and so much to fine tune.
Kevin King:
Is this something that e-commerce sellers, Amazon sellers should be paying attention to? Whether it’s doing what you’re doing on the PPC or just should they, should they get their head wrapped around this whole AI, is it gonna make that big of an impact in the way they run their businesses in the future? What are your thoughts on that?
Ritu:
I would say embrace it. Like, I know there’s a little bit of skepticism of AI taking over jobs and the world and all that stuff. I would say the more you can familiarize yourself with what the possibilities are the better it would be for you and your teams to kind of take advantage of it, leverage it to improve your business in so many different ways, right? There’s productivity you can improve. You can also go over to the visual side of things with Midjourney, which is like this visual interface that Amy Wees talks about and she did in her BDSS talk as well. Really cool stuff with creating package design or creating you know, just layouts and just amazing product design even with just a few instructions, you know and merging of concepts that you never thought were possible before, like almost imaginary and almost like whimsical in a sense, like she designed like this new style of garlic press just as an example, which I thought was pretty cool.
Ritu:
But you can use, use it for so many different creative ways. So I would say, I mean, you don’t have to have formal or anything, but just try to get just warm up to the idea that this is a thing that will take the world you know, over and in some form or the other, it is gonna touch your lives, you know? So I, I would encourage people to embrace it and learn it so they know what they’re up against or, you know, it might be something that will really helps you in your business. Well,
Kevin King:
Before we wrap up, I just have two quick questions for you. Just leave everybody with two quick pieces of advice. When it comes to PPC on Amazon. What is a common mistake that you see a lot of people making that they need to address, and what’s something that you see that a lot of people are missing out on an opportunity on, on PPC that they should dive deeper into?
Ritu:
So when we do audits we’ve done hundreds and hundreds of audits, and this is a common theme. There will be campaigns that are doing extremely well in terms of really good aco and they’re delivering results and so on, but their budgets will be capped. That’s so common that I almost wanna say, Hey guys, go, go back home today and check if that’s happening to you. It’s easy to find this out. Like just go to your campaigns manager, look for, just put filters, two filters. All you need is two filters. One ACoS is less than let’s say 10% or 15%, which means your ACoS is really good. And set the budget filter to less than 20 or 25 or 30, something like that. And you’ll see a bunch of campaigns I bet you, you will bunch of campaigns that you could instantly increase the budgets on and let the flow of money come to you because these are like printing machines, right?
Ritu:
These are your best campaigns, but you might be capping them for reasons that are not sure. I’m not sure why people cap their budgets when something is doing great because it’s likely to give you a much better ROI. So yeah, anyway, that’s one kind of common mistake that I see all the time. The second one you said was an opportunity, right? So in terms of opportunities, I see people only focusing on sponsored product keyword based ads. Like that’s the majority of the focus, and I know why that is, because most of the knowledge that’s out there, the teachers, the gurus and the software providers in the space only talk about keyword ranking. Like that’s the major focus of PPC. When you say PPC, you’re talking about keywords in some way or the other, right? Now, those are important for sure, like, don’t get me wrong.
Ritu:
That’s very, very important and you definitely need to have a solid strategy for keyword ranking. However, don’t do it at the expense of ignoring everything else that Amazon has given us in terms of low hanging fruit that other people aren’t focused on, like sponsored brand ads, sponsored brand video ads, sponsored display, certain types of sponsored display ads for product targeting and remarketing. If you are a brand that has a repeat purchase rate, then you should be doing remarketing ads. It’s such a waste to have people come to your page. And so there’s two types of remarketing views, remarketing and purchase remarketing. So if someone’s come to your page and has not purchased or someone’s gone to a competitor’s page and has not purchased, well those guys are ready, they’re just probably busy. They got distracted by something else, you can bring those people back cuz they’re almost there, right?
Ritu:
You wanna bring them back. So that’s an that type I see people don’t use much. And then with sponsored brand headline, I still don’t understand why people don’t use that tool effectively. They think it’s more expensive or they think this is for brand building that’s not true. I use sponsored brands all the time for bottom of funnel conversions. It all depends on what kind of keywords you pick for sponsored brand ads. Like if you take long care keywords and let’s say you match it very closely to the headline you’ve picked for your sponsored banded boom, you can have conversions just with that, you know? So don’t miss out on the most valuable real estate on the search results page, which is right up at the top.
Kevin King:
Awesome advice, Ritu, as usual if people want to learn more about you, reach out to you or find out more about PPC Ninja or how, how would they go about doing that? Yeah,
Ritu:
So you can follow me on LinkedIn. So I’m my full name, Ritu Java. You can also look up our website, ppcninja.com. And we have an awesome blog. We also offer a free mastermind program four weeks that they can enroll in for free and it just we just keep repeating it. So we are on to our 30th Mastermind, I believe coming up shortly here in April. And then we just keep doing them. As soon as one finishes, we give it a break, and then we start again. So you get to hang out with awesome sellers across the world and that way you can kind of learn more about our software and our agency and our content and we can grow together. So, yeah.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Well, I really appreciate your time today. This has been great information and can’t wait till I see you the next time, either at an event or maybe who knows, speaking at BDSS again.
Ritu:
Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate it Kevin, and really look forward to the next time. So, yeah, have a good one.
Kevin King:
Thank you. No doubt, Ritu is one of the smartest people in our space when it comes to PPC and advertising on Amazon. She’s always got some great stuff to share and in fact, you know, that mastermind, that free mastermind class that she was mentioning I just may have to go check that out myself. Probably will learn a few things in that as well. Hopefully, enjoyed this episode. Got some good value from it. We’ll be back again next week. But before we go, I’ve got some words of wisdom for you. You know, the person who gets one shot needs everything to go right, but the person who gets a thousand shots is gonna score at some point. So in business, find a way to play the game that ensures you get lots of shots. Again, the person who gets one shot needs everything to go right, but the person who gets a thousand shots, it’s going to inevitably score at some point. Find a way to play the game that ensures you get lots of shots. We’ll see you again next week.
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