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– Hello everyone and welcome to episode 38 of Two Amazon Stars and a Microphone. I’m Dustin Kane and with me, as always, is Kris Gramlich. How’s it going, Kris?
– Going good, how are you doing man?
– I’m good, kind of a rainy day here in Kansas City but that’s all right. That’s all right, even in the rain, we can still improve our Amazon businesses, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. We’ve got five tactics to be a better seller on Amazon. So a lot of these are really good tactics, some of these I’ll be implementing as well as we go. But, yeah, it’s always nice to look at different ways that you can be better. Even little incremental ways you can be better can make a big difference in your overall business. So let’s jump in. Let’s start with tactic number one. That’s a product targeting in your pay per click ads. I think people are really well versed in PPC, understand this, they do this all the time, but anybody who’s just setting up an automatic targeting campaign or et cetera, might not even know that this is happening and that they can make this better for their ads.
– Yeah and especially if you have a better product that has better reviews, a better price, and maybe a better image, you could definitely target your competitors and steal some sales away. So, product targeting is great. It’s probably not used, I mean it’s used by sellers, but it’s probably not used to it’s fullest. And if you have a product that is a subscribe and save offer or repeat purchase, this is a way to gain more market share and gain more customers, so targeting products that you have a better offer, more reviews, better price, probably better images, can help you get some more customers. So, this is something that Sellozo automates. We automate this as well, inside your ads. You can automate PPC, you can automate your product targeting ads, but this is where you wanna go to a search result, find the ASIN’s you wanna target, put ’em in the campaign, and start targeting those.
– Yeah and to let everyone know where these ads show up on Amazon, is they actually show up on a product listing. So the keyword is the ASIN, so if you found one of your competitors that you have a better price, better pictures, et cetera, you put their ASIN in your ad campaign, then your ad will show on their listing just below the bullet points. It’ll say, sponsored products related to this item and so they’ll see a whole bunch of items there. So there’s a win-win with this kind of advertising. Number one, you’re leveraging the traffic to your competitors’ listings. So you don’t have to pay for that traffic. So if you have a competitive advantage against the highest ranked product, organically first, your main keyword, you wanna definitely be product targeting them because you’re gonna, all the traffic that goes to their listing, they’re gonna see your product as well. So this is very underutilized. If you’re running automatic campaigns, Amazon’s automatically doing this for you, but they may not be doing it efficiently for you. Making backfires, well if you’re running product targeting on competitors that you don’t have a competitive advantage against and you generate a lot of clicks with no sales, that can hurt you. So you definitely wanna take advantage of this, but yeah, if you’re watching us live, Kris has pulled up on his screen the section where it says, products related to this item. So it’s just basically below the fold, just below the bullet points where you can see this. So, really, really effective. If you want this to be automated, again this is something that Sellozo can do for you because competitors come onto the marketplace all the time so the challenge here is constantly staying up with all the competitors that you should be targeting and also, whether or not those are profitable ads that you’re running. So we automate that.
– Yeah what’s really cool about these ads, if you notice, when I hover over ’em, it shows all the images, I’m not clicking anything. It’s just constantly rotating the images through the product. So this is a really neat feature. This is something fairly new. So your second image and your third image are super important because when customers get to this spot and if they just hover over the title or the image of the product, they’re gonna be able to see all your images without even having to click on the product. So it could save you some money, really. They’re not just clicking around and costing you cost per clicks, they can just hover over this and see if that’s something they wanna buy. I haven’t seen this anywhere else, I’ve only seen it on these type of ads, but it looks like Amazon’s testing this out as well. I would imagine this is gonna roll out to other areas probably in the future.
– Oh yeah, they’re definitely gonna be rolling this out into other areas. It’d be great if this was on sponsored products, just-
– Oh yeah.
– I mean, it’d have to be a huge advantage or just on your organic listings. It’d be nice if people could just see all of that, so yeah, be nice when they roll this out, but, you absolutely wanna take advantage of the product targeting.
– And this is another one, if you guys are watching the screen here, we’re doing on YouTube and Facebook Live, they also have sponsored brand product targeting, so you can target specific products during sponsored brand ads. These are a little bit more creative, you can add your own little touch to ’em, put a little writing, creative, in there, titles and stuff, but these are just above sponsored product ads, so you could do both. I mean, you could do sponsored brand product targeting and sponsored product targeting on the same competitor and steal some sales, hopefully.
– Well, this leads right into our tactic number two. Tactic number two is defensive product targeting. So this is the clip of what we were just talking about. What you can do, if you don’t want people advertising on your listing, is take all of your other products that are related to that product and you actually bid on your own ASIN’s so that you fill up all those spots. And so ideally what happens is if somebody goes to your listing for your product and they scroll down to the sponsored products relating to this item, that’s just all of your products too, all of your other products. That way you’re defending that space from competitors. And you wanna do that with sponsored brand and sponsored product. So this is another really effective strategy. This is even less, I would say used, than product targeting in general, but this can really protect your brand from having your competitors advertise against it.
– Yeah and you can see this guy’s doing it right now. He’s getting outbid on some of these placements. He’s got three of his products in this area, but he’s being outbid by some of these other competitors here. But yeah, he’s bidding on his own ASIN to protect that real estate on his listing. So if you have multiple product lines of the same skew or you just wanna maybe launch a new product and it goes in conjunction with the current product, you can target that ASIN that’s getting all the traffic and just throw that new ASIN on there as an ad and maybe some people will buy ’em both together or something so, definitely worth targeting your own ASIN’s, ’cause if you’re not gonna do it, somebody else is.
– Absolutely, absolutely. So check that out, both the product targeting and then doing a defensive product targeting strategy. Again, inside Sellozo, we can make that easy for you and we can automate all the bid adjustments. All right, moving on, tactic number three. You wanna make sure you’re not factoring in the PPC data from today and yesterday when you’re making decisions. That can skew your ACoS and you will actually maybe make a bad decision based on that. So this is something I think also happens all the time and it’s not really understood that that data’s inaccurate from the last couple of days. Takes a long time for, for example, sales, their pending, so they don’t count as a sale, even though you see your ad spend is calculated there, so that’s already skewing your ACoS negatively, as opposed to what it is. So if you’re making bid adjustments based on, and you’re factoring in today and yesterday’s data, you could have some inaccurate data.
– Yeah and there’s a look-back period, like seven days, I think there’s a 14 day look-back period, so it’s best to look at your campaign data at least two weeks back. But that’d be like a minimum. I would probably look more on a 30-day window, just to get a bigger picture. But yeah, we see this talking to sellers, like, hey, my ACoS is extremely high today. It’s like, well you don’t wanna look at it for today. You wanna wait a while. There could be people that add the product to their cart and just waiting to buy it. And that won’t be attributed to that ad until they actually purchase it, so don’t look at your campaigns on a daily basis. Definitely wanna look at it longer picture, ’cause that will give you a better view of really what’s happening with your campaigns.
– I actually don’t think the sales attributed until the product ships.
– So even better.
– Yeah, it could be that’s why that two days are important. Now, there’s an easy way to handle this and that to use automation for your ads. I mean, the Sellozo algorithm that automates and optimizes your bid adjustments considers all this. I mean, it’s the awaited algorithm of all historical data and it’s not waiting for yesterday and today’s data in that decision. So I mean, that’s where if you wanna just not even have to deal with this, I highly recommend using something like Sellozo where you can automate that process and have an algorithm that automatically takes all those things into account.
– Yep.
– All right, number four on the tactic list here. This one’s pretty cool. This is something that you’ve done, Kris and it’s just a nice sneaky way to launch a new product. Essentially what you wanna do is, if you’re launching a new product that’s similar to a product that you already have that has good traction on Amazon, then you wanna create a child variation of that for your new product. What happens is, you get, number one, you get all that traffic, you get that organic ranking and you get all the reviews that your other product are now associated with your new product, so it’s gonna massively help conversions and the driving of the traffic and I’ll let you talk about just how you’ve implemented that Kris.
– Yeah, so Amazon’s been checking this out lately. I’ve had a couple of skews where it was the same item just a different type of item.. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but it was of the same niche, but it was just a different type of product, I guess. And so I’ve seen it where they’re sending out emails saying this skew is gonna be separate and they automatically do it, they take it off and they do it automatically and they put it as it’s own listing, but you can still list a new ASIN as a variation of an existing product. Just get those first initial reviews, five, ten reviews for it, and then just split it off by contacting customer support and having them do it. So, it’s a little here and there a little bit, but you wanna make sure that either you have a plan to split it off yourself, or if you decide to keep it on there, make sure it’s a valid reason to keep it as a child. But, Amazon will at some point, they will split it off. This was used in the past couple of years, people were doing this a lot where if they were selling a dog brush, they would come out with six different models of dog brushes, but put ’em all listed on one variation, as a variation, and then Amazon will split ’em off, so you could do it different sizes, you could do if you saw two-pack, you could put a two-pack on, three-pack on and then as they get reviews, you could split those off into their own listing and now you have more real estate you’re covering for all the same keywords. So you could potentially own the whole page for your main search term. So yeah, it’s definitely a thing to do, ’cause it’ll help you get that momentum going and get that fly wall going for your new product.
– Oh yeah, it’s definitely hard to launch a product from scratch, cold. You gotta keep that momentum going and that is a, making it a child variation is just an easy way to drive traffic to it, get those reviews, and yet when you split ’em, those reviews go with ’em. The reviews are attached to the variation, when you co-mingle them, they show up altogether as the review, but when you split ’em off, those reviews go their separate ways with those products so, definitely a good way to do it. All right, let’s talk about tactic number five. This is another one that we’re really looking into, you and I and then also, we’re gonna be bringing on some guests to go into more detail on this, but for us who are private label sellers, private label and white label sellers out there, we may not have looked into the opportunity of selling wholesale products to diversify and also, there’s so much time we spend researching new products, our cash flow could be at work for us. I mean, there’s a lot of benefits to wholesale and so yeah, you definitely wanna add wholesale products to diversify.
– Yeah I feel like this business model is definitely blown up over the last year, year and a half, ’cause a lot of people are getting into it. There’s a lot of good follows on Instagram. If you guys have Instagram, check out some good follows on there, but this is something I’m excited to talk about. We found somebody locally that does wholesale, bring him on the podcast, learn a little bit more about what they do, but I know you’re interested in it, I’m interested in it. It makes sense, you’re selling products that already sell and you’re just attaching your hits to it and writing that out. You’re kinda riding the wave a little bit. So, this is something I have looked more into ’cause I do think it would be good to diversify. Have a little bit of private label going, then have some wholesale going. Maybe your wholesale product can fund your new private label product or something so, it’s definitely something to check out.
– Exactly and it’s a completely different strategy. You’re not having to worry about the launch, ’cause you’re buying a product that’s already ranked, it’s already got traffic coming to it, it’s already known by the public. I mean, there’s just so many different tactics. You are having to worry about winning the Buy Box, which is different than a private label seller who never has to worry about winning the Buy Box. So there’s some different tactics, but it makes sense. I mean, there’s always cash sitting on the sidelines if you’re in the private label sometimes, or you need cash to fund a product, and wholesale is just a great way to do it.
– Yeah and I invite anybody listening, if you’re doing wholesale and you’re doing well at it, we would love to have you on. So we would love to interview you, learn more about it, you could tell us a story. You could always reach out to us at sellozo.com. S, E, L, L, O, Z, O.com, and we’ll bring it up, we’ll hear your story. We’d love to learn more about it.
– Absolutely. So those are just really quick actionable steps that you can take to make it, to be a better seller on Amazon. Just again, product targeting, your PPC. Defensive product targeting to protect your listings. Make sure you’re calculating your data effectively, don’t factor in today’s and yesterday’s PPC data or use automation like Sellozo to help you out. Launching a new product as a child variation and then selling wholesale products to diversify. So those are your five tactics for the day to be a better seller. Thanks, everybody for listening in. Again, if you’d like information like this more often, go to Facebook and go to the Sellozo page on Facebook, like it. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, it’s Sellozo on YouTube, and also subscribe to our podcast so you can get these. We do these almost every single day, except for the weekends and it’s a lot of fun and that way you’ll be on when we bring in our guests to talk about wholesale coming on soon, so-
– Yeah, for sure.
– Anyway, everybody, have a great day out there, and have a happy Thanksgiving. We’ll be doing one more podcast tomorrow and then it’s on to Thanksgiving weekend, so hopefully everyone has a great Thanksgiving, we’ll see you tomorrow.
– See ya.