#313 – Start With PPC On Amazon, Then Do This Next To Further Boost Sales
In episode 313 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Tyler discuss:
- 01:30 – Recapping The BDSS Experience
- 05:00 – A True Amazon Seller Should Be Diligent And Thorough
- 05:30 – What Is Ampd And How They Got Started
- 07:45 – Breaking Down What Is Amazon Attribution
- 10:30 – The Problem When Running Ads On Google
- 12:00 – Why Should Amazon Sellers Pay Attention To This?
- 14:15 – Buying Intent Search Keywords Are Key
- 14:45 – Mistakes Amazon Sellers Commonly Make When Advertising On Google
- 17:35 – How Do You Find High Converting Keywords For Google Ads?
- 19:45 – How To Prevent Rogue Clicks To Your Google Ads
- 21:15 – How Much Marketing Budget Do You Need To Make It Scalable?
- 25:20 – Their Thoughts About The Brand Referral Bonus
- 26:45 – Does External Traffic Impact Your Organic Rank And BSR?
- 29:00 – How Ampd Helped Getting The Competitive Widget Removed
- 33:00 – Try Sending Traffic To Your Amazon Storefront Pages
- 37:00 – Mobile And Desktop Traffic
- 39:45 – Is Ampd Working In Other International Marketplaces?
- 41:00 – How To Get In Touch With Tyler And Ampd
- 42:40 – This Week’s Golden Nugget Tip
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 313 of the AM/PM Podcast. If you’re selling on Amazon and you’re not running ads on Google, you’re missing a major opportunity somewhere between 25 and 33% of all the traffic that comes to Amazon originates on Google. Today we’re gonna be talking with the Tyler Gregg from Ampd, and we’re gonna be talking about everything you need to know to capture this lucrative market and actually have Amazon pay you to do it. Enjoy. Welcome Tyler Gregg to the AM/PM Podcast. It’s exciting to have you here.
Tyler:
Hey Kevin, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. I’ve listened to the podcast over the years and especially since you’ve taken over. So excited to be actually on it now.
Kevin King:
Awesome. And we just saw each other not too long ago at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit in Austin.
Tyler:
Yes. Down there in hot Austin. I know that’s where you’re from, but it was an awesome show. Really, really great experience and it was fun to set up. It was so much more networking-focused and getting to actually know people. I know there was the scavenger hunt, which was a ton of fun, and actually get not just talk shop all day, but actually kind of get strategic and think through problems with people. That was a ton of fun, cool way to do it.
Kevin King:
What did you think of that? How’s your team doing on that?
Tyler:
You know, we could have done better but it was–, we enjoyed running around Austin, let’s put it that way.
Kevin King:
So for people that are listening and that they think in a scavenger hunt, they’re thinking, “Hey, I gotta go, go grab some eggs from this place and, you know, go find a used sock from over here and go find you know, I don’t know, some crazy record over here or something.” But can you describe what this was for those that are not listening and how was it actually a networking event and how was it different than what you might have expected or what people might be thinking?
Tyler:
Definitely. So the Billion Dollar Seller Summit team put us into groups of four, and then basically gave us a list of 20 or so clues, and the clues were located all throughout the Austin area, within one or two miles, maybe a little bit more than two miles away on some of ’em, but all within birding, scootering, Ubering distance, and you had to figure out the clue and then you had to go pick up something or go to that location once you figured out where it was and get the clue from that location and all the clues added up to an address or a place that you need to go meet up and be the first one there. So it was both a get it done the fastest, but also picking up points along the way, a certain amount of points for taking pictures at locations or those kinds of things.
Tyler:
It was a ton of fun, a really great way to get to know people and actually see the city. You know, in most shows, you go into the conference hall and, you know, you come out three or four days later and you get a breath of fresh air for the first time. So this was a really great way to actually explore the city. And, you know, Austin’s a cool spot, a little hot in August, but a really, really cool spot and fun city. Obviously, it’s grown a lot in the last couple of years.
Kevin King:
I think it was a little bit surprising to ’em, but how much of the city, even people that live here in Austin that did it, like, man, I’d never actually been to this place or to this place. And so, as Tyler says, you had to, you, if you wanna see what this was, you can go actually to billiondollarsellersummit.com/race.pdf, billiondollarsellersummit.com/race.pdf, and you can actually see what they had to do. But they had to actually gather these–, they didn’t know where the final destination was and they had to spell out, it’s almost like a Scrabble kind of thing, spell out and figure out where this final destination was by picking up hints along the way at the different stops. And it wasn’t about being first, it was about being the most thorough.
Kevin King:
So actually the team that came in sixth, I think that arrived at the final destination, sixth actually ended up winning. And it was a $2,000 cash price to the team. Plus they got to choose one member that got a VIP for all expenses, paid, airfare, hotel, and everything to the next event next year in Puerto Rico. So when we put it together, people were saying, Hey, you gotta do something different this time. You know, in the past we’ve gone out and raced cars at the F1 track, or we’ve gone and done paintball worlds or thrown axes or gone wine tasting. And so we’re like, let’s try this out, and let’s see how this goes over in the hot Austin heat. And I think it went over really
Tyler:
Well. Yeah, it did. And it’s funny, it was a race, but I think it took some teams a little bit of time to realize that they didn’t have to be first. And I know that everyone raced out there at the beginning thinking, let’s go through the clues as fast as possible and all that. But you’re absolutely right, the winner wasn’t the first one done. The winner was the one that was diligent as a true Amazon seller should be, and took the time to try to collect as many points as possible.
Kevin King:
So speaking of diligence and being as thorough as you can be, that’s something that you guys help a lot of sellers do. I mean, you’re with a company called Ampd, and you guys have been around for a while in the Google space, is that correct? Like 5, 6, 7 years, something like that right? Tell me the backstory of what you guys have been doing before you got into this Amazon space.
Tyler:
Absolutely. An excellent transition there. Very veteran transition into what Ampd does. What we do is we help Amazon sellers market their products on Google Ads, and we’ve been building Google Ads Tech for a little over seven years. We went through Techstars, and actually graduated Techstars, which is in a technology incubator program in Austin of all places. So it was fun to be back there. And I know our founder was at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit as well. Enjoyed being back in the city. But we’ve been building Google Ads Tech to help drive efficiency when sending Google traffic to DSC stores. And we built that for about five and a half years. And then finally we said, Okay, this is all good. The technology’s strong, it’s backed by this really powerful data science engine, which we call Maxwell, but why are we sending it to branded D2C stores when we could be sending it to this traffic to the best-converting website in the world, which is Amazon?
Tyler:
And so, about a year and a half ago, we ended up partnering up with the Amazon ads team, and specifically the attribution side of their team, because they just rolled out Amazon attribution, which is the first time where you could actually start to track conversions from external channels. And with our technology combined with Amazon technology, we were able to create this, think of it as an intermediary between Google and Amazon to empower Amazon sellers who don’t have any experience with Google Ads to actually start showing their products on search results. And when people click that ad, they go straight to either the Amazon product listing for that brand or the Amazon storefront with full attribution. So you can actually see what’s working, what isn’t working. And now you can treat Google Ads in the same way as you can treat Amazon ads. When you think about Amazon ads, you have all the data you need to make the right decisions, click costs, CPCs, add-to carts, conversions, ACoS, RoAS, and whatever metric you want. You never had that for Google Ads before, but now with the Ampd platform, you have all the exact same data, all in one spot to make the right decisions.
Kevin King:
So for a lot of you that may not understand exactly what got a lot to unpack in what he just said there. So Amazon attribution is, if you’re not familiar with what that is, I guess it’s about a year, year and a half ago or so, Amazon said, “Hey, you know, we like outside traffic. We like it when our sellers are actually promoting us.” Because if someone comes to the Amazon website, we’ve always done this in the past with affiliates, or people just going to amazon.com or Amazon themselves has run ads like on Google and Bing and some of the other platforms. They start to realize like, “Hey, the more people that we get into our site, the more chances they are gonna buy something, and maybe they’re not gonna buy what they clicked on.” Maybe they, they’re on my blog and they saw I’m selling the best razor, and they, I clicked to go see what the best razor is, but you know, I’m like, eh, I don’t really want a razor right now, but you know what, I need some toilet paper or, or whatever, you know, and they go and they click and they buy something else.
Kevin King:
So just getting the person into the door. And so what Amazon did is they said, “Hey, to encourage this, we got affiliates that are driving a lot of traffic, but the best people to drive traffic are actually, are brands themselves. Let them go out there and promote us and promote their products outside of Amazon, like on Google.” And if they use a special link that has this attribution tag added to it and comes to a few special pages on Amazon, I think they’ve opened that up. Now you can do more pages from the beginning it was just the storefront, and now I think it’s expanded beyond that. We’ll talk about that. But they actually said, “if you do that, we will give you 10% back as a commission.” So basically they’re in essence supplementing your ad spend. So that enables you to go out to someplace like Google that might have been cost prohibitive in the past and actually run ads at a positive return on ad spend and actually get people into to hopefully buy your product.
Kevin King:
If they don’t buy your product, they might end up buying somebody else’s. And Amazon’s like, “Well, if they end up buying someone else’s, that’s still okay with us.” But if they buy your product and you’re doing a good job on your product, we’ll give you 10%. So that’s what he’s talking about by the attribution. And then, you know, Google is the biggest ad platform in the world. I mean, there’s, I mean, Google combined with YouTube, there is no bigger ad platform in the world. Amazon and Facebook are right there in step with ’em, but Google is, they own it. I mean, and so a lot of people don’t realize what’s the latest number. Something like 25% of all the searches on Amazon originates first on Google, is that about right?
Tyler:
Yeah, I’ve heard it’s around 33%, but yeah, somewhere in that 25% to 33% range for
Kevin King:
Sure. So a lot of, a lot of people don’t realize that. So if you go to Google and you run some ads, and especially if you put, there are certain things you can do that will talk about where you put, you know, a lot of people go to Google and they type “best shaver Amazon” for example. And if you can capture that, be ranked there on Google in the advertising, and capture that link straight back to your product on Amazon, it can overnight add a tremendous amount to your sales. But the problem is, running ads on Google is not easy. It’s a very sophisticated platform. It can be daunting. You get in there and you’re like, What do I start? And they’ve got some help things and some basic stuff, but it’s kinda like running an ad on Facebook.
Kevin King:
If you wanna suck money outta your wallet, just hit the boost button on Facebook. When says, “Boost this ad on Facebook, just hit that button and say, 50 bucks” and kiss your $50 goodbye. That’s kind of like, Google has that too, for people that aren’t, don’t understand how to use Google, but the power of Google, if you really know how to do it can be super magical. And that’s where Ampd has come in and they’ve taken some of that pain point out of an Amazon seller having to really master and learn Google to actually bring traffic to Amazon, and then instantly be able to track it, not have to create your own spreadsheets or download all the reports from Amazon and like, “Okay, did my Google ad really work or did it not work.” And then the Ampd program can adjust this stuff on the fly using some AI and some other stuff.
Kevin King:
So it’s really, really powerful. And there are a lot of sellers that, and I know you guys have refined it. I know a couple of people that tried it when you first launched it and they said, “Ah, it’s kind of hit or miss, I don’t know.” But now I’m hearing you guys have refined it and you’ve really gotten it dialed in. And a lot of people are saying, I’m seeing massive results off of it. You know, just in the Billion Dollar Seller Summit group there’s a little private WhatsApp group, and you guys were at the event, and you were one of the sponsors and you talked about it. And some people tried, said, Hey, I’m gonna give this a shot. And people were posting and there’s like, Is this working for me, me, you know, and there are some comments that anybody tried it and three or four people posted back saying yeah, it’s working, it’s doing this, it’s doing this. And so why should people be paying attention to this if you’re running on Amazon?
Tyler:
Yeah. So that’s great to hear that you’re here and the kind of where we started a year and a half ago, kind of you know, and then now much more consistently. I, there’s a lot that goes into that. First off, what we learned was to be successful in sending Google traffic to Amazon, it is so much more than just creating pixels or creating these attribution links. There’s this strategy that needs to go into this. And over the last year and a half, we’ve been able to refine the platform to incorporate some of that strategy, but then also supplement it with our team as well. And I mean, we’ve seen over 20,000 Google campaigns to Amazon, which is a very high volume, especially for something that’s only been around for about a year now in general mission general availability.
Tyler:
And we generally know what works. We kind of know what product can get the best results, and we understand how to get the campaign set up from the beginning to get success as quickly as possible. So we’ve baked all of that into our platform as well as the service that AMP provides to try to give companies the best chance at success. One of the things that I’m particularly, particularly proud of is what we call our ASIN review. I actually spoke about this at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, is our team can actually review your catalog and say, Hey, these products are set up well for success on Google. Try these ones, these products over here. People just aren’t searching for them on Google, or they don’t have the qualities that convert pretty well from Google to Amazon. So that’s one of the things.
Kevin King:
What are some products that actually do convert well? What are some products that actually some categories that if you’re not on Google, you’re missing the boat and maybe some that’s, yeah, maybe a little tough? Can you give us a few examples?
Tyler:
Sure. Absolutely. The ones that are tough are like personal decisions, right? A gift basket. If you search gift basket, Kevin on Google, you’re thinking something totally different than if I search gift basket on Google. So those ones, by nature of that personal decision, are pretty difficult products that work really well. Just like a very basic example would be a broomstick. If you search on Amazon, like an Amazon search broomstick, you’re gonna see a million results, right? But if you search broomstick on Google, why are you searching for that? You’re not searching it to research what a broomstick does. You’re searching it because you already know what a broomstick does. You’re at the bottom of the funnel and now you’re saying, “Okay, I need to buy a broomstick. Guess what? Amazon’s gonna get it to me in two days, probably. It’s probably gonna be a pretty good price.” And when you can put your ad right there at that buying intent search on Google, all of a sudden those can convert really well. So broomsticks are such a basic example, but those kinds of products where, you know, people aren’t just researching your product, they’re actively buying it can work really, really well.
Kevin King:
So what are some mistakes e-commerce sellers make when they’re actually running independently of your software? Making, when they run Google Ads, are they not going after that buyer intent, getting the word Amazon or on Amazon or the word buy or some of those it’s like a list of 15 or 20, maybe it’s more, but that’s what I gave out like in the Helium 10 Elite a few months ago. These buyer intent modifiers is important? Or can you walk me through a little bit of the mistakes that a lot of people make and some good ideas on how to make your Google Ads actually perform better?
Tyler:
Sure. So there are two big mistakes that we see all the time, and it took us a while to realize this, but this was the mistake that a lot of people made in our first few months of launching last year, and it makes sense now looking back on it, but they took their Amazon keywords on Amazon ad keywords and said, “These are the keywords I crush on Amazon ads. I’m gonna put those exact same ones into Google.” A huge problem with that is that people search the two platforms very differently. So you have to do keyword research to see how are people searching for my product on Google and where they’re in a position to buy it. They’re not researching it, but they’re ready to buy. So finding those buying intent keywords was the biggest thing. And I cannot stress this enough, do not just put your Amazon keywords into Google because they may work, but more than often they’re probably not gonna convert very well. The second one is that we see it all the time.
Kevin King:
What are a few of those? But before you go into the second one, what are just a few examples of buyer intent keywords?
Tyler:
Yeah, so think about, like, one example that I use would be whiskey glasses. You probably have keywords on Amazon that can work pretty well, like drinking glasses or gifts for men or stuff like that. Those keywords can probably work for you and convert on Amazon ads, on Google, you need to be much more product specific. Whiskey drinking glass, whiskey glass for drinking, and those kinds of keywords where the person said, “Hey, I’m specifically, I, I know I’m buying a whiskey drinking glass. Like that’s what I’m looking for.” So you have to be very, very product specific and get, we think about it as a funnel, right? And I know funnel is a little bit of a newer term coming into the Amazon world but there are top-of-the-funnel, middle-of-the-funnel, and bottom-of-the-funnel search terms. And you have to identify the bottom of the funnel once where it’s clear that that person who’s searching on Google has already worked their way through the stages of the funnel and now they’re ready to buy. And you find those keywords, yes, You know, drinking glass Amazon with the Amazon keyword in there works really well, but it doesn’t have to be Amazon keyword word. We see non-Amazon keywords work really, really well as well.
Kevin King:
So what do you find these? If someone’s new, how do they find these words on Google? I mean, you got helium 10 to find out what’s working and the Amazon backend and stuff. How do you find this on Google?
Tyler:
Sure. So a couple of different ways. First off, our platform does a really good job of mining these keywords, and what it does is it combines Amazon like what terms you have in your product listing page with how people are searching for similar terms on Google, and it surfaces ’em as like recommendations that then you can pick between. So one of the things that we’re really excited about is we actually recently launched updated pricing. And our pricing now entails campaign creation, and keyword research done for you. So if you’re a brand and you’re looking at Google Ads, you’re a little bit overwhelmed. It’s the holiday season coming up, you don’t have the time to figure out Google ads. We’ve implemented a pricing tier to where you sign up and your first two ASINs that you wanna promote on Google, the amped data strategist team will actually create the campaigns for you.
Tyler:
What that means is we use our technology that we’ve been building for the last seven years plus a human component where our data strategists who have run over 20,000 campaigns, actually create the campaign for you. They find the right keywords. What this does, and what’s going to do for all of our sellers and all of our brands is eliminate a lot of like rookie mistakes that we would see a novice use. And then we start your first few campaigns, you see exactly what we did, and then you can scale it out to the rest of your products.
Kevin King:
Hmm, okay. So on Google though, things can get really expensive really fast. There are clicks on Google, I remember when I first started, it used to be goto.com, I don’t know, this may date me, I don’t know if you’re probably not old enough to remember that, but goto.com was actually the first people that did this advertising bidding, where you’d bid, you know, a certain amount per keyword. And back then I could get bids. This was 20-something years ago for like a penny, 2 cents. And then when Google, they basically mirrored that and they just exploded that. But now some categories, depending on, I don’t know about broomstick, but some of these categories, it’s four or five, six, $10 a click. So how can I make something like that work on Amazon, even with the attribution or is that not what I should be looking at? Should I be looking at more of the long tail type of things or you walk me through that thought process a little bit?
Tyler:
Sure, sure. So first thing, you always wanna put a max CPC on your Google campaign. What this does is it limits that upper tier to where you’re not gonna be seeing these rogue clicks. We used to see it all the time, which is why we implemented this into our system, as you don’t have a max CPC in there. Google sees that as an opportunity, and things get competitive, “Oh bam, $15 per click.” And it’s like, well, there’s a good waste of money, right? So what we always recommend is to set that max CPC on your campaigns out of the gates so that you’ll never spend over a dollar per click or a dollar 50 or whatever you set that threshold at. That’s gonna limit it. However, for the most part, not every product, not every keyword of course, but a lot of the time the Google CPCs, I think the average CPC right now that we see in our system is about 60 cents per click. So that’s lower than like your average Amazon ad. Obviously, conversion rates are gonna be different. So at the end of the day, it does come down to that mathematical equation of what’s the CPC, what’s my conversion rate, and what’s my price to the product? What can my ACoS be, of course? We teach all that during our onboarding is how do you get that low CPCs. How do you find the right keywords that are gonna drive the conversion rates that you need in order to make Google a scalable channel of revenue?
Kevin King:
People always ask, “Well, okay, I wanna try Google. I wanna test this out if it works, I’ll scale the heck out of it, if this is working and make me money, I’ll spend whatever I need to spend a hundred thousand a month, whatever it may be.” But if I wanna just test, I’ve been selling on Amazon, I’m doing pretty well and I just wanna give this a shot, should I say, “Okay, I’m gonna spend 500 bucks a day, a hundred dollars a day.” What kind of numbers do I need to be running to give this a fair shot to see if this works or not?
Tyler:
Sure, this answer surprises a lot of people. Obviously bigger sellers, it’s gonna surprise more, but we recommend $ 15-a-day budget per product that you want to test. What this does is it allows you to conservatively test dip your toes into the wire to see, okay, how effective can this channel be for me without going overboard? And then about 30 to 60 days in that is gonna have generated enough data for you to start understanding, okay, how efficient can this be? What keywords are working, and what keywords are not working? And then from there, you haven’t spent a crazy amount of money, but you’ve spent enough to understand the trajectory, and then you’re able to scale up based on what the data are telling you. So we always teach month one higher ACoS testing the waters month two, reading the data that you’ve collected, and then month three you’re starting to scale up and increase those budgets.
Kevin King:
So how does this work for you to track it? If I’m running an ad on Google for my broom, I’m not driving that traffic directly with a link back to Amazon with attribution, it has to go pass through somewhere. Does it pass through like a redirect or something and or does it go straight through?
Tyler:
Goes straight through. And that’s such an important component of this. We tested redirects, we’ve tested everything and what we’ve found is going straight through does the best performance and gives you the cleanest data set to make the right decisions. This is all about collecting data and making decisions based on data. So we send it straight to either your Amazon product listing page or we send it straight to your Amazon storefront. And this is important for a couple of reasons. One, just how attribution works, but two, is Google reads the landing page. So if you try to do a redirect or you try to send it somewhere, your ad quality score is gonna be lower because Google’s gonna have trouble reading that page. Google also their terms of service has issues if you try to squeeze pages and redirect pages, cuz like they require being able to see the landing page so they can make sure you’re not selling guns or whatever but all those terms that Google doesn’t want, they have those systems in place and they have to read the page to make sure you’re not selling stuff that they don’t agree with.
Tyler:
So we send it straight to your Amazon product listing or your Amazon storefront page.
Kevin King:
Now you guys only do Google, or does that extend into YouTube too because Google owns YouTube, or is there any other platforms out there, Bing or anything else? Or is it just Google the Alpha–, what’s it called? The alphabet companies.
Tyler:
Yeah, we are Google searching right now and that is our bread and butter. That’s what we know through and through Google’s difficulties. So we are hyper-focused on nailing this. And obviously, it’s shown from what you’ve heard too, you know, a year ago we are learning, right? And now we have it pretty baked to where we know it works. So we’re hyper-focused on Google, and we’re working on other marketplaces as well. You know, we always get asked about the typical other ones, Walmart, and Target as well. So our plan is to just absolutely nail Google as an ads platform and then to be able to expand to different marketplaces that sellers on.
Kevin King:
When you say Target or Walmart, you mean right now you’re Google to Amazon only, you’re not, I can’t do use your software and advertise on Google and send it to Walmart for example, as of right now.
Tyler:
As of right now, no, because Walmart doesn’t have the attribution foundation that Amazon has. So Amazon has Amazon attribution, but Walmart doesn’t quite have Walmart attribution for us to build off of and be able to see the conversion rates. But that’s the plan eventually to be Google to marketplaces is what we’re gonna be really nailing.
Kevin King:
So a lot of the sellers are using your services, they see in that 10% attribution coming back, and that basically covering the entire cost of their Google ads in a lot of cases?
Tyler:
Sometimes for sure if you get a 5% ACoS, you get your 10% back, you’re actually at negative 5% a cost. We do see that. We never really like to set that as the expectation of course, but it can a hundred percent happen. I think that Brand Referral Bonus is such an incredible bonus that Amazon provided and it, it makes it such a win-win I think for Amazon as well as for the brand, right? Brands have tried to do Google to their D2C stores for a long time, but just the conversion rates are not there on their D2C stores. We get asked this all the time, it’s like, Hey, why would I’d rather send Google traffic to my D2C store where I don’t have any seller fees? It’s like, yeah, but it doesn’t convert that well, does it?
Tyler:
So now this 10% back, it’s really a kickback on your seller fees. So instead of a 15% seller fee, you now have a 5% seller fee for external traffic. And so all of a sudden that starts to be pretty comparable to what your seller fees would be on a Shopify or BigCommerce. But the big difference is you have significantly better conversion rates when you send it to Amazon versus your D2C store. And obviously, the win for Amazon, as you called out earlier, is they’re getting more traffic and they know that traffic’s gonna buy stuff from Amazon.
Kevin King:
And are you seeing a lot of people say that just by sending outside traffic to Amazon, whether it’s Instagram or Google or as long as that referral link like you were saying, you don’t wanna mask it with a redirect as long as that referral and there are software tools that you know, fake it and everything, but Amazon can tell in a lot of those cases? Are you seeing a lot of people, there’s nobody can ever really prove this, but do you have any evidence it actually, whether it converts or not, it actually raises you up in the ranking? So some people say have said in the past, you know, if I’m running outside traffic, I’m listening whether it converts or not for broomstick and when I don’t run that traffic, I’m in spot number 12 when I run the traffic I’m in the search results on Amazon, the natural search results organically at six or something. Do you see any evidence of that?
Tyler:
Absolutely. So when we actually launched, we launched just tracking rank. We didn’t even have attribution fully built into our product and so when we did our alpha testing, our beta testing, it was just tracking the impact on ranking, it was very conclusive. Then we rolled out attribution, got the conversions, and everything in there as well. So we’ve seen in our data, our sellers report it pretty consistently. The trick is it has to be quality traffic. You can’t just send horrible traffic there like Amazon knows better than just crap traffic. So it’s gotta be good quality traffic and that’s what our platform obviously helps does. But we’ve been saying this for years and we’ve kind of been trying to figure out, okay, what’s actually going on in that nine algorithms no one knows, right? What was cool though was a few weeks ago we actually had a webinar that Amazon hosted for us and was one of their partners.
Tyler:
We, they call us a measurement partner. They hosted a webinar for us and actually featured the brand-new for bonus team, the Amazon ads team, and amped. And it was the first time where Amazon actually walked through a couple of case studies that they had built that they’d gotten approved by their legal department to say, which I’m sure took a while, but their case studies actually specifically called out that external traffic does impact ranking and does impact best seller ranking for a year and a half. We’ve referred to it as this halo effect. Something’s happening ranks have been going up, but it’s this halo effect of doing it. In their case study, they referred to it as the snowball effect. So we’re gonna start calling it the snowball effect instead of the halo effect, cuz that’s Amazon’s terms for it. But it was really cool to see them actually acknowledge it and it goes along the lines of like what we’ve been seeing. Two years ago, they rolled out the attribution program in beta to encourage sellers to bring external traffic. A year ago, they rolled out the Brand Referral Bonus to actually like give that seller fee kickback to encourage it further and then now actually recognize that it does impact ranking. It’s just kind of right along that line as they’re ramping up to try to win that war for Google traffic.
Kevin King:
One of the things I think that was a problem in the beginning, and I think you guys were instrumental in getting this changed, is I would go run my ads on Google with an attribution link and the people would click to buy my broomstick. And I would send them to maybe my storefront or to my main listing page, but right up at there at the top, there’d be another banner that would have like also say like the cheapest one, the best-reviewed one, the most popular one or I would say also consider these from other sellers or people who viewed this also viewed. And it was like, why am I sending this over here? And they’re just showing my competitors up there and it was like, come on man. And you guys actually–, tell me about how that’s actually changed now.
Tyler:
Yeah, definitely. So exactly what you described when we used to send external traffic to a product listing page, Amazon would put at the very top of the page a widget. It was called a competitive widget that would show up to three of your biggest competitors right there at the top of the page. And we didn’t really realize that we’re Google people, we’ve really got to understand the Amazon world the last year and a half, but we didn’t really understand that was there until we saw it in our data and we saw when that widget showed up, conversion rates were significantly lower than when that widget was not there. So we started deep diving on our side of when is that showing up and when is it not. Then finally we got to the bottom of it and we took it to our Amazon ads partner team who’ve been incredible partners in the journey here and we said, Hey guys, like we’re doing everything we can to bring in traffic for you guys, but the conversion rates are bad cuz you have this competitive widget.
Tyler:
And I still remember our CTO, Brandon Nutter showing me this and saying, “We gotta get Amazon to remove that.” And I’m sitting there going, “Are you crazy man? Amazon’s not gonna remove that. Like are you kidding me? Like there’s no way” and it’s not worth our time. Like, let’s focus on us. He’s like, “No, we’re gonna get Amazon to remove this.” So we got on the call, we meet with Amazon a couple of times a week and we showed it to them, we showed them the data we had that was hurting conversion rates when it was there and they looked at it and they’re like, “Okay, we’ll get back to you.” And I’m like, “Sure, sure, sure, we’ll we’ll hear back from you about that I’m sure.” But then sure enough over next took seven months, but over the next seven months of testing it out, and working with them to try to get it removed towards the end of summer in 2022, they actually officially removed that widget and not only did they remove it, but they also changed the widget to feature other products from your brand.
Tyler:
So it went from a minus one of your products and then other products to your product and other products from your brand. So all of a sudden the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell other products from your brand. And so took seven months, took a long time for us. Seven months is a long time for Amazon. It’s a very short time, but now it’s removed and it’s incredible to see what it’s done to conversion rates and again, just another indication that Amazon’s really serious about helping brands bring in external traffic and really upping the ante, again and again, to make that incentive legitimate and worthwhile. What
Kevin King:
Has it done to conversion rates? What are some examples of what you’ve seen change since that change?
Tyler:
Yeah, I can’t give the exact numbers on it, but conversion rates have significantly increased on it. It’s not like it went from 10% average conversion rates to 30% average conversion rates, but it’s gone up a good amount and it logically it makes sense. Obviously like less competition, you’re gonna have less of a leaky funnel. Now there are still competitors on your product listing page like this removed the widget at the top. So everything above the fold is your product, but consumers can still scroll down and see other products all those sponsored ads at the bottom of the page above your A+ Content, All of that is still there. What we recommend for sellers that are conscious of leaky funnels and conscious of competitors trying to steal their traffic is product listing pages work great but to your Amazon storefront pages. Your Amazon storefront pages are an incredible place to not only lead with your brand and grow your brand a little bit but all of a sudden you’re fully insulated from your competition. So instead of liking your product and competitive products, you can have your product featured front and center and other products from your brand as well and you can build out the page to really sell and address any concerns or highlight any features about your product that you wanna communicate to consumers.
Kevin King:
That’s something you should test though because if you send it to your storefront, they have to go through more clicks to actually get to the product and actually add it to the cart. It depends on how you have your storefront set up. You can actually add the buy now and stuff. So, if you don’t have your storefront set up, it could be incorrectly or not optimized, right? It may be they gotta click more to get to it, which may decrease the conversion rates, but if you versus going straight to your listing where they can just sit, add to cart or buy now. So you gotta make sure if you’re gonna do the storefront, you do it correctly. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Tyler:
Excellent call out Kevin. Yes. So you need to have your storefront set up to be transactional. So often I look at Amazon brands storefront pages on Amazon of course, and it’s lifestyle images and you send traffic there, there are nice pictures, it looks great, it’s aesthetically pleasing, but then you have to click on the pictures or click the buy now button that then takes you to the product listing. What we teach all of our brands that are serious about their Amazon storefront is to make sure it’s transactional and Amazon’s done a really good job with their formatting and designs for how you set up your storefront to where you can set it up with product grids or product sections. And what those do is they allow that added cart button to be their front and center. So when you send traffic there, the call to action is added to the cart and it’s right there above the fold. We have a bunch of information on our website that teaches kind of the basic principles of what a very strong storefront conversion page looks like. But it is so important that you have to have it set up for conversions if you wanna send traffic there.
Kevin King:
So what are some mistakes that you see people making when they send it to their actual product listing page that’s really hurting them, whether they’re using your service or not, that they could actually make some changes that could really increase their conversions?
Tyler:
Sure, so product listing pages, like we don’t really recommend changes to product listing pages just because we know that most of the time that’s set up for SEO reasons and all that on Amazon, so we try to stay out of that. But for Amazon’s storefronts, there’s such an opportunity to customize that page because it’s not affecting all your other marketing initiatives. Most of the time Amazon storefronts it’s hard to get traffic there so people don’t spend much of time or energy building them out. But with external traffic, it’s super easy to send traffic there. So it’s worth investing time to set it up, right? And what we recommend is that the product be front and center, but then think about like the objections that people have about your product that you have to overcome or think about the feedback that you’ve collected about your product, or think about the reasons people have returned your product.
Tyler:
All those things you can now address in a product in an Amazon storefront page. One example that we see quite often is, you know, people will say like, “Hey, like I get a lot of returns because people buy the wrong size” and it’s like, great, well on a storefront you can put things on there that says, make sure you select the right size and you call out that objection and that can really help the return rate or other situations if you have a premium quality item and maybe that premium feature that you’re charging a higher price for that features hard to really verbalize and communicate on a product listing page. Amazon’s storefront page is a really great landing spot to really call out why is this product price so much higher. Well, it’s cuz we have premium quality, we source it from a certain place, or that kind of reason. Amazon’s storefront pages can be a great way to address all of those things that you really wanna highlight.
Kevin King:
What about the difference between mobile and desktop? For a lot of people, mobile is the dominant thing that people are using to search on Google and on Amazon something like 70-75% of all searches now are starting, it depends on who, what study you’re looking at is starting on mobile, but a lot of the purchases are actually still made on a desktop. And so a lot of people they search on mobile, they’re in their car, they’re on the subway, they’re, you know, taking a break at the doctor’s office or whatever and they’re searching, but they, a lot of times they don’t finish the purchase there, they go back and they finish it when they’re on their laptop or on their desktop. Are you guys tracking the differences in there and are you making any changes and adjustments in bid strategies or anything along those lines?
Tyler:
Yeah, it’s a great question and I really think it speaks to. I think this next stage of selling on Amazon is full-funnel marketing where all of a sudden Amazon’s giving you these features and these abilities to start marketing to the full funnel. Like the obvious ones, right? Amazon’s storefronts, right? You can build your brand on Amazon. Now they have Amazon brand ads on Amazon where you can just put your brand front and center and try to send it to your Amazon storefront. Full funnel marketing is gonna be such a big component. Think about like the follow button, be able to follow up and email your followers or message your followers, right? Now with mobile and desktop for your question is so many people, I’m guilty of it myself, right? I just pull up my Google search, start typing some research terms into Google, and figure out what product I want.
Tyler:
I usually end up on Amazon, now I know what that product is and I come back to my desktop and purchase it there, but I found it on my mobile first. So it’s really important to be able to pick that up and be able to make sure you’re showing up where people are searching. And it is one of the things where, you know, we talk about the snowball effect or the halo effect of sending external traffic. I think there are a few components that go into it. One is just the rewards that Amazon gives, but the other side of it is if you’re filling the top of your funnel, you might not see direct conversions from it, but it’s all funneling down and eventually it converts. We see this a lot in our data where there’s only a 14-day attribution window on Amazon attribution. So what happens if someone searches your product on Google, clicks the ad, looks at your product, adds it to the cart, and then 15 days later ends up converting? Attribution misses it, so your ACoS isn’t gonna reflect that conversion, but it still was a sale for you and you can see it in your total sales, you can see it in your tacos equations. So really being able to understand that full funnel of marketing think’s gonna be a very important component for being successful as a brand on Amazon here in these next few years.
Kevin King:
Now are you only working in the US market right now or does Ampd also work in international markets?
Tyler:
It works worldwide. We are limited to where Amazon attribution is available in terms of tracking conversions. So where that is in North America right now, Mexico, the US, and Canada those three markets and then all of Europe except maybe one market. If you go to Amazon attribution, if you google Amazon attribution, they have a very clear vision of what market’s available, but basically all of North America and all of Europe.
Kevin King:
So if I’m not using Ampd right now, why should I be?
Tyler:
Yes, it’s the holiday season. You know, CPCs are going up right now as the competition on Amazon ads gets going. So you need to be starting to do things your competition is not doing. Not every Amazon brand is tapping into Google Ads right now. So it’s an awesome opportunity, kind of this blue ocean opportunity to really, you know, go out, try something new, and now you have the data, right? Ampd gonna give you the data to show you how efficient, and impactful it’s for your business. So it gives you this opportunity to diversify your marketing and drive new revenue.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Well Tyler, I really appreciate you coming on. What’s the website address? Can you spell that out for people cuz they may not spell it correctly?
Tyler:
Absolutely. It is ampd.io. That is ampd.io. You can check us out there. We have a ton of help centers, we have a lot of education around how to be successful with Google Ads and then our team’s available as well to help anyone that’s new to Google and anyone that needs a little bit more help or maybe you’re an expert on Google Ads is already and you just wanna talk to other experts. We’re here to help. We’re here to talk. We love Google Ads. We’ve been building Google Ads Tech for a very long time, the better part of a decade now. So we love talking and shopping around Google ads and we love the Amazon world because Amazon converts and is a lot better than Shopify D2C stores. So we’re excited to be here. We love engaging with as many Amazon brands as we can.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Tyler, thanks again for the time today. Appreciate you coming on.
Tyler:
Yeah, thanks so much, Kevin.
Kevin King:
So I think you agree Tyler just shed a bunch of light on how valuable Google can be for your Amazon business right now. So whether you used Ampd or not, I would recommend you take a look into using Google with the Amazon attribution link and driving some traffic over to your listing. It’s going to help you quite a bit. And if you wanna make sure it’s done in a very efficient way, check out Ampd. Also don’t forget the Helium 10 Elite, the monthly training that I do for advanced sellers on Amazon. You can come in and we do a monthly training where we bring in three or four different speakers. I speak for myself, giving out seven Ninja hacks. We have weekly round tables we have one a month with me where we get on a Zoom call and we just chat and mastermind.
Kevin King:
And if you’re new to selling on Amazon, be sure to check out the freedom ticket as well. It’s included with any Helium 10 membership at no extra charge. Looking forward to seeing you again next week. Hopefully, you got some good information out of this week’s episode. Before I go, just gonna leave you with this week’s little golden nugget. “Prediction depends on events outside your control, but creation depends on events within your control. Don’t guess about the future, shape it.” Remember, “prediction depends on events outside your control. Creation depends on events within your control. Don’t guess about the future, shape it.” See you again next week.
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