Amazon PPC 2021 Strategy with Sellozo Featuring Dan Rogers

Amazon PPC 2021 Strategy

Dan Rodgers:

What’s happening, guys? Today, we have a little bit of a different session. This is going to look a little different in terms of content and quality, but we’re going to be covering PPC, and we’re specifically going to do this with Sellozo. I’m going to have Kris from Sellozo in an interview today, and we’re going to be covering what Sellozo can do for you.

A lot of you have been asking about PPC services, how to optimize, whether you should use an expert or not, and this video should help you establish if that’s something you want to do. We’re going to be covering Sellozo and what they offer in terms of you using their tool suite by yourself or having Sellozo experts actually work on your campaigns for you. There’s two different levels there, and we’ll be covering the costs of each.

This isn’t only about the Sellozo tool. I’m also asking Kris because he’s obviously very involved with seeing all different sellers’ PPC campaigns, I’m asking him questions like what are the biggest mistakes sellers make with PPC? How do you actually rectify those? Do you pause or delete campaigns when you’re done with them? How many keywords should you include in certain campaigns? All that type of thing is also included here. I think whether you want to know more about PPC or you want to know more about services that can help you with PPC, I think you’re going to find this valuable, so let’s jump in.

Welcome to the channel, Kris. Really stoked to have you here. I know we’ve met a couple of times, but I’ve been wanting to share you with the audience. For those who don’t know, Kris is part of the Sellozo team. They specialize in helping sellers specifically with Amazon PPC. I remember I had a meeting with you and one of your colleagues. I have never met people so enthusiastic and pumped about PPC, so very happy to have you on. I think a lot of people are going to learn a lot from you, as well. If you want to start off, Kris, just by introducing yourself, and Sellozo, what you guys do for people, and just a bit of background, and then we’ll jump into some more specific questions I think sellers are going to want to know about.

Kris Gramlich:

My name is Kris Gramlich. I am an account exec with Sellozo. What we do is basically just help sellers understand their Amazon advertising. We help with automating that, meaning that the tool has the option of going into your campaigns and optimizing those campaigns based off of a target ACOS that a seller sets. Then, we do all the heavy lifting for you, we as the software does.

Yeah. We’re a team of former sellers or current sellers. We just like to really help sellers with their PPC, because, and you know, Dan. Selling on Amazon is a lonely journey. Having somebody to bounce ideas off of or work with is super helpful, so that’s what we do. We just enjoy really making sure sellers are understanding what they’re doing with their ads.

Dan Rodger:

Then, when a seller comes to you, where is a seller when they come to you? What stage? Do you find a lot of sellers coming to at launch? Do you find a lot of sellers coming to you once they’re looking to really optimize their campaigns? Where are they at when they approach you?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah. It’s a mixture. It’s such a mixture, because we do get a lot of new sellers, but we also get established sellers, people who are ready to take their campaigns to the next level. On the new seller side, we do an onboarding call with all sellers, so you can go to the site and just do an onboarding call with myself and another team member where we just talk to you about Amazon and learn your business.

If you’re not there yet, we’ll just tell you, “Hey, you’re not there yet,” but we’ll give you some good tips on how to get there, meaning like, set up your campaigns the right way. Maybe you need to get your titles better on your products, or maybe you need better images. We’ll look at your listings first, because if your listings aren’t optimized, meaning poor photos, poor titles, poor bullet points, no reviews, we don’t want you to waste your time with Sellozo and trying to get that set up, because that’s not going to be a good fit. It’s not going to work out well.

It’s important that your listings are ready, and then we’ll help you with your ads going forward, but yeah, we do both. We get new sellers all the time that want help getting started. We’ll guide them that way. Then, we get established sellers that are like, here’s my listings, and they’re ready to take it to the next level. They’re ready to scale. That’s where we jump in and help them out.

Dan Rodger:

Yeah, I totally agree with that as well, in terms of even just as a seller, you want everything fully desirable before you make it visible. If you have a shoddy listing, and you spend all this time, money pushing it to the front of results, you’re pushing something which isn’t that desirable to the front, so it has to be the other way around. That’s awesome that you also help with the images like you help with not just the PPC side. It’s a cohesive thing or a comprehensive thing that you look at.

Then, you spoke of ACOS or ACOS. I think a lot of sellers are going to be wondering because that’s what I would want to come to you for, is how low can you get my ACOS? What is the average, and I know that’s a hard question, but what’s the average ACOS reduction you see or achieve for sellers? Then, also, what’s the biggest one? What’s the largest ACOS reduction that you’ve achieved for a seller?

Kris Gramlich:

That’s a great, tricky question, because we get that a lot, of like, hey, I want to lower my ACOS. Well, sometimes a low ACOS isn’t necessarily a good thing. You may be leaving money on the table. If you’re not maximizing your campaigns, there’s probably sales you’re just leaving out there.

The word ACOS, and low ACOS, and the terminology, I need a low ACOS, I think that’s misunderstood because people think that they need to get a 10% ACOS, or they need to have a 20% ACOS. My personal opinion is to get a break-even ACOS. If I’m making 40% margins on my product, I’m shooting for a 40% or even maybe like a 10% higher than that for my target, because I want to maximize my campaigns. I want to make sure my bids are going to be as high as they can be. I want to generate as much sales as I can, because I know when I get sales through my ads, I’m going to get my organic ranking up more. I’m going to start to rank better for all my keywords.

We have reduced a lot of really high ACOSs. The highest one that comes to my mind is 70%. That was a big reduction, but that was as simple as doing negative keywords, cutting out some search terms that were just unprofitable, and then doing some really good bid management. That was an easy victory there because the seller was never really optimizing their campaigns.

We’ve had scaled a lot of campaigns highers because sellers are starting to understand that a 10 or 20% ACOS, yeah, it sounds great, but you have more room there to generate more sales. That’s where we do this onboarding call. We’ll look at those campaigns, and we’ll look at the listings, and say, “What’s your break-even margin?” A lot of people don’t really realize what that is. They don’t know what they’re going after.

That’s a tool. That’s where we say, “What’s your break-even margin?” Okay, I make 40% on this product. Let’s stitch your target ACOS at 40% to maximize all the sales within that campaign.

If you are in a subscribe and save the product, or you are in a repeat purchase product, I would go higher than that 40%, because you’re trying to get people to subscribe to your product, and that’s going to ultimately lower your ACOS in the long run, but you’re going to get more subscriptions, so you’re paying faster for subscriptions.

If you’re on page one already for your keywords, and you’ve already achieved that ranking, then yeah, we can lower that target down to a more profitable ACOS. To answer your question, it’s long-winded. It just really depends on where you’re at in the product cycle. Are you launching? If you’re launching, let’s go high. Let’s go to the moon. If you’re already at ranking, let’s bring it back down a little bit. That’s why, again, we do an onboarding call with every client, because every client’s in a different stage, and they all have different goals. We’ve got to make sure we understand those goals so that you understand how Sellozo’s going to work to get you to that goal.

Dan Rodger:

I agree with that, as well, especially in the beginning. I’ve spoken about that a lot. Any sale for your product is going to raise the organic ranking, and that’s what you need. In the beginning, the one you can control is the sponsored listing, the one you’re talking about, the PPC one. That’s the one you can put at the top of the front page. That’s what you want to try to do, even if it’s a high ACOS in the beginning because you need to get that organic listing up.

Another thing you bring up, which I think is important, is people sometimes think ACOS is account-wide, like if my ACOS is that, then it’s eating up all my profits, but ACOS has to do only with sales through ads. You also have to remember that your sales on your organic listing, not your sponsored listing, the ones on your organic listing are going to still be full profit. It’s not like, even if you’re making a loss on the sales through ads, it’s not a loss overall, because you’re raising this organic listing, which is full-profit sales.

I think that’s really important that people understand that distinction. In terms of Sellozo, you spoke of the experts working. What if I’m a seller who doesn’t want the expert help, but I want extra tools? I want to be able to see what’s happening in my business in a more tabulated or graphical form. Is there a way I can use your tools without experts, or are there two options there? What are those?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah. Yeah, there is. We do get a mixture. Some sellers want just managed support. They want somebody to take it over and run with it. Some sellers are savvy enough, they understand how the PPC works, and they want to still control it. You can do both.

When you sign up for Sellozo or try Sellozo out, it’ll give you the option if you just want to do ad automation and self-managed, which means you’re the one doing it, or there’s another option where you could do ad automation and ad expert support. That’s where you’re going to get assigned a rep. Somebody’s going to be assigned your account. They’re going to call you, and we’re going to do another call with you.

There’s a lot of touchpoints at the beginning. That’s just because we want to learn your business, learn your goals because we want to set it up the right way the first time. You could do both, yeah. You could do managed if you feel like you need somebody to take it over. Some people do managed first because they want to get the right foundation set up at the very beginning, and then they just downgrade at the end and just bring it back in-house, and they do it themselves.

That is super common, where people will, like, hey, I don’t have the time to learn all these ad strategies. I want somebody who already does it, do it for me first. Then, after I figure this all out and learn it, I’ll just get rid of the expert support. and just manage it myself, and downgrade my subscription. That’s totally fine. That happens a lot, so there’s options. You can do both of them.

Dan Rodger:

Could you share what that dashboard looks like or what the tools look like if you have that?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah. This is what the dashboard looks like. We’re going to track your sales, costs. There’s an option in here where you can put your cost of goods, and we’ll track your profits. Margin, and then total ACOS. This refers to what you were talking about earlier about, you got your PPC cost, and then you’ve got total ACOS. We’re going to track your total ACOS, so that’s going to bring in your organic sales. Then, we also separate that over here on the right side, PPC sales and organic sales, so you can track where that money’s being spent and how your ranking is going.

Dan Rodger:

Just to jump in there, and just so people know exactly what that total ACOS is because that’s so important, that is your ad spend as a percentage of all your revenue. Out of everything you’re making in sales, how much are you spending on PPC ads? You can see, that one’s a lot lower than your-

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah.

Dan Rodger:

That’s a really good total ACOS, but even if you have that at under 10%, that’s usually very good, that’s usually healthy, like six, seven percent. That’s what’s ultimately going to come off your profit margin. If your profit margin were 40% on your product, or if out of your revenue, your total profit is 40%, you can deduct that total ACOS from that, and then you would have your net, per se, you would have your ultimate profitability.

Kris Gramlich:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). This is a metric that I love just to keep track of, especially for those that I keep talking about subscribing and save or repeat purchases. This is a metric I love because you want to maximize this, because you’re trying to get a lot of subscriptions or repeat purchase, if your product is something that is constantly reordered, you’re acquiring that customer at the very beginning, and then you just constantly get subscriptions, so keep track of that.

We do track FBA fees, commissions, shipping. This is your cost of goods, so if you wanted to put your cost of goods in here, you can. It’s not necessary, you don’t need to do that, but if you want to use this tool as a way to track your profits on your products, you can just download a template, and just upload it back inside here, and then we’ll track each product and see how profitable it is.

I want to scroll down to show some other things, real quick. We can get back to some questions. This is the ad automation highlights. Over the last 30 days, up here at the top, it’s the last 30 days, Sellozo has automatically created 10 new campaigns for this seller. It’s done over 40,000 bid adjustments. It’s found almost 1700 new keywords. It’s negated 128.

This is all automatic. We track this everywhere in your own activity log, if you can see over here on the left, there’s an activity log. We’re going to track all of these changes, but this is to give you a high level. You can just login here, maybe every other day, see, okay, I had these happen. This is what’s happening for my bid adjustments, my new keywords, and my negative keywords.

Now, you don’t have to use automation. It’s optional. We’re not going to start automating your campaigns immediately. When you sign up for Sellozo, we’re [inaudible 00:16:01] the import data. Then, you can pick and choose which campaigns you want us to automate. We go over that again on your onboarding call.

It’s not like, some people get concerned that we’re going to start automating the campaigns immediately. It doesn’t work that way. It’s just a simple import, and then from there, we’ll do an onboarding call to show you which campaigns that you want to automate, you can pick and choose, so just don’t be concerned about that.

Then, stock. We do track your stock. This seller has 625 products currently in stock. We track the dollar amounts. These are the stock levels and of how long the product is going to currently last until it runs out of stock. He’s got about 238 products that are going to sell out within less than a month, 100 that are going to currently the last one to two months, three to six, and then greater than six months. We do track your stock levels.

Then, this is one of my favorite parts. This is a live-order map. This map shows you where all your orders are coming from. It’s nice to see where your people are placing their orders. For anybody who’s doing external traffic to your listing, like via Facebook ads, sellers are using this as a way to geo-target those Facebook ads based off the data they’re finding in their Sellozo account. This is a cool little map.

Dan Rodger:

This is very cool.

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, this is, and it gets a little creepy here. You can really zoom in. I’m not getting-

Dan Rodger:

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, I can get really close, like almost to the intersection, but it’s nice to see where your orders are being placed. Then, if I wanted to focus just on the east coast right here, I could throw an ad up on Facebook and say, “Okay, according to Sellozo, all my orders are coming from this region. I could use that as a target.” That’s really neat.

Then, over here on the right, this is a live order stream. This is going to show all the orders coming in. For some people, we added a feature where it’ll play a sound, so like a cash register. If you want to leave your screen up, and every time you get an order, your computer will make a cash register sound that you got a new order. Some people like that. I’ve turned it off for just the purpose of this, because this guy is obviously, yeah, he’s doing 1.7 a month. We would be sitting here all day just ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. No, we don’t want that.

This is the dashboard. It’s nice. It’s neat to see all the orders. It does it all over the area. It tracks all your orders. Then, this is where you could see your profitability.

The next section is called the product view. Product view takes all your SKUs, all your seller SKUs, everything that you’re selling, it takes all those in here, and it dissects them. This is one product, and this is all the data for this product. Everything from your revenue, to your cost and your fees, to your PPC performance for this product, for your inventory. It’s tracking the buy box over here. We’re going to see how the buy box is performing.

There’s going to be a ranking in that category. This is currently 208, number 208 in blasters and foam clay. There is a re-pricer in here, so if you do want to use a re-pricer, it’s already included. This is one product, and this is all the stats for it. Then, on the right, we’re tracking your PPC ACOS for that product and then your total ACOS for that product, so we separate that out.

Now, this seller obviously hasn’t put his cost of goods in here, but we will track how much you make per unit, and then what your margin is after all these fees are taken out right here at the right. It’s sorted by your best seller. As I scroll through, every product is going to be different. These are all your SKUs. Then, this really gives you really good data for this product, that you can, if I need to replenish inventory, I could see that. What are my units sold over the last 30 days? Here’s my sales velocity. He sells about 10 per day.

Everything has its own stats. I’m a big fan of this one, especially for new sellers. You can really learn a lot about your product here. If it’s something that maybe you liquidate because it’s not profitable, you can find that information out here. If it’s something you need to reorder, because it’s flying off the shelves, you can figure out that here. This is one of my favorite sections.

Dan Rodger:

Can you give us an overview of how much would this cost, at the level of just getting the tools, which you just showcased, and at the level of actually having an expert come on and help?

Kris Gramlich:

Our pricing is based off of just the number of products that you choose to optimize inside the app. Our opening price points are $149 a month, and that’s a flat rate. We’re not adding percentages. We’re not adding hidden fees. It’s just a flat-rate monthly fee of $149 a month. If you choose to add the managed support to your account, it’s an additional $499 a month on top of that $149.

Then, we do ask for a three-month commitment for that managed support. The reason being is somebody’s going to be assigned to your account. They’re going to need to learn your product. They’re going to need to learn your search terms. They’re going to set up the campaigns for you. They’re going to have weekly calls with you. There’s some time there that they need.

After the three months, like I mentioned earlier, if you feel good, you got it all figured out, you got it in house, you can just get rid of that. Openings are at $149 a month. We do have a two-week free trial, so if you go to Sellozo.com, it’ll ask you to book a demo first. That’ll be either with myself or another team member. We’ll do a demo with you, a little bit more in-depth, and then we’ll follow up with you, add a free trial to your account, and then you’ll do another onboarding call with myself or another team member with your data. We’ll go through it all and get you set up the right way.

Yeah, 149 is the opening price. No percentages, no contract, just a flat-rate monthly fee.

Dan Rodger:

Remember, if you guys do use the link in the description below, you’ll get 20% off the first month, as well, if you’re interested in this if this is something you need help with. One thing I can tell you is Kris, there is no one more enthusiastic and pumped about PPC than Kris and his team. I will never forget that meeting.

Kris Gramlich:

I appreciate that.

Dan Rodger:

Yeah. Could you give us an example of when a seller would come and ask you for those experts to work on the campaigns, and what specifically would that expert do? Briefly, what are the steps they’re going to take? What are they going to look for, and what are the first adjustments they’re going to make?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, that’s a great question, because there’s so many different avenues with PPC. You can do different strategies here and there. Some people are at different stages. They’re either trying to prove profitable with their ads, they’re trying to launch using ads. That first call is all about learning where you’re at and what your goal is. Are you in the launch phase? Are you trying to launch a product? Are you already profitable, and you’re trying to make your ads more with your ACOS goals? It’s all about learning where you’re at.

If you’re in the launch phase, then what that’s going to entail is we’re going to launch a bunch of campaigns. We’re going to get your target ACOS figured out. We may even add a little bit of a top-of-search multiplier to some of those campaigns so that we make sure your keywords are going to show up at the top of the search. We’re going to have weekly calls with you to go over the past data that we just set up for you.

Then, if there’s any changes, let’s say, because, I mean, you and I both know, there’s always changes within Amazon. One day, your product is selling really well, and the next day it’s down. If there’s any changes, that’s where all of those weekly calls, like, hey, this product is no longer listed, or we need to really scale up this product. Sales have gone down. Those are all things that we just pivot, and just start a new process, and just get you going, and try to bring back those sales for the product, or just move onto the next, and figure out what’s happening with those other listings. Yeah, it’s all about learning your goal, learning your budgets, and then setting up campaigns the right way.

Dan Rodger:

Then, what would you say is the most common mistake you see when a seller comes to you, or when those experts go in and take a look, what’s the most common problem you see? Just so those watching can take cognizance of that and maybe even start adjusting that now, work on that themself now, or see if actually, they do need help with that. What’s the most common problem or misunderstanding that you see sellers making with PPC?

Kris Gramlich:

Not enough testing. Not enough testing is the big problem. They’ll just have one auto and one manual running for one product. They’ll do one match type, and it’ll be an exact match. I’m a big fan of testing them all out.

This is a testing game. You’ve got to test PPC. It’s not just a, let’s just do one auto, and then one manual exact, and call it a day for that product. For some products, we would recommend having like 12 to maybe even 20 different campaigns for just one product. That’s the biggest problem is not enough testing.

Then, when we do that onboarding call with them, this is stuff we cover. They’re like, “I only have $50 a day to spend.” Well, if that’s the case, then we’re going to focus solely on their 5 or 10 keywords that they really want to rank for and put all that budget towards those keywords because that’s where they’re at with their budget.

Some sellers may, like, “Hey, I could spend more.” Okay, well, let’s go different match types. Let’s do some product targeting. Let’s do some sponsored brand ads. That’s the biggest problem is not enough testing and a thought process of just like, just do an auto, and just do a manual. I’m a big fan of trying other match types, sponsored brand, sponsored display, all those, so that’s the biggest problem, is a lot of sellers get stuck up on just doing two campaigns, an auto and a manual, or they don’t do enough keyword testing, different match types.

Dan Rodger:

What campaigns would you recommend in the beginning, like say someone watching this now is about to launch a product. What campaigns would you recommend? I know it does differ between products, but what would you recommend in general for a seller to run right in the beginning at launch, and then even once they’ve done the launch, what campaigns would you adjust in the more optimized level, so which campaign types through that product life cycle?

Kris Gramlich:

Yup. If I’m launching a new product, I’m doing single keyword campaigns with my top 5 to 10 keywords that I’m targeting in exact match type with a 25 to 35% multiplier on top of the suggested bid that Amazon gives me for that keyword. The reason I’m putting them in a single keyword campaign is I want all my budget to get thrown at that single keyword, so that Amazon sees that, hey, he’s willing to spend money on this keyword, and I want to keep ranking for that keyword, improve my ranking. I want all my budget to be thrown at that single keyword.

Dan Rodger:

To be clear on that, you’re saying you actually, you’re creating, let’s say, an exact match campaign, and you’re putting a single keyword in there, and you’re only running that campaign for that. It has one targeted keyword in it.

Kris Gramlich:

Correct.

Dan Rodger:

Then, you’re doing that five times.

Kris Gramlich:

Correct.

Dan Rodger:

For your five top keywords.

Kris Gramlich:

Correct.

Dan Rodger:

You would bid 25% above Amazon’s suggested bid?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, so when it asks for my bid, I just use the suggested, and then in the placements, I add a multiplier to that, like a 25%, and just let that multiply that bid. Then, inside Sellozo, what I would do is set my target ACOS higher than my break-even, because I want my bids to constantly move up so I can get that top of the search.

I may only do this for like two to three weeks, to keep my ranking and track that. In the background, what I’m doing is I’m having my main phrase, let’s say I’m selling a dog brush, I’m putting my dog brush in a broad match campaign, or maybe even a phrase match. You could do both. That one’s like my new search term, so it’s going to be like my mining campaign. It’s going to find me new search terms. Then, I’m going to let that run for like two to three weeks.

Then, I’ll go look at my search term report. This can all be done on Sellozo. I’m going to be looking at my search term report. Any keyword that I get over two conversions, I’m taking that out, and I’m adding it again to a single keyword campaign by itself. I’m making it a negative in my broad, so my broad continues to find more. I have a little bit of both. I’ve got my mining campaign going as a broader phrase match, and then I’ve got my five keywords that I know I want to target in exact match, all single keywords.

Dan Rodger:

Then, what about in this mining campaign? Do you also consider clicks? Because obviously, getting a conversion, especially if it’s a brand-new listing with low reviews, getting that conversion’s hard. I agree with you, if it converts, that’s like, this is definitely a keyword that we need to focus on. What about clicks? Because that obviously shows interest. Do you consider that, or do you only wait for the conversion?

Kris Gramlich:

Great question. I do look at clicks, but I’m looking at what is getting clicks and no sales, and then I’ll make that a negative exact in that broad, so I stop spending on it. If I’m getting clicks on relative keywords that I know I show up for, and I know I should sell on, if I’m getting clicks, and I’m getting no sales, I’ve got a listing problem. I need to go look at my listing and see why somebody is not buying my product when they type in that search term because if it’s relative to the product, and if I’ve done my listing right, I should be getting sales. If I’m getting clicks and no sales, either it’s the wrong phrase altogether, or I got a listing problem somewhere, and I need to either fix an image, or fix the title, or fix a bullet point somewhere.

Dan Rodger:

What I find or how I think only for the keywords you know you should be converting on, because I agree with you, sometimes the keyword’s irrelevant. In that case, you want to put it a negative exact match or negative match, so you’re not running, not wasting money on it. In some cases, you know this is my keyword like we should be converting for this. At launch, sometimes I feel like because we have lower reviews, that’s why we’re getting the click because they’re interested, but we’re not getting the conversion.

Sometimes what I would do, and what I would probably do with your strategy with the single keyword, is I would move the ones I’m sure are perfectly relevant with a lot of clicks, I would probably move those to exact. Even if I don’t go aggressive on them, I’m probably going to move them, because I feel when I do have reviews, I’m going to convert on those. I think there is a lot we can gather from clicks, as well, but it’s interesting. I’m really interested in the single keyword campaign strategy and testing that more, because I know Amazon has these little quirks, and it brings me to my next question for you, is when you do pause or stop a campaign, let’s say you don’t want to be running a campaign anymore, do you choose to pause them or delete them? Because there’s a lot of rumor or rumors on if you delete it, you’re going to lose some of that keyword ranking and indexing you’ve gained from it, so some people just pause it. Do you have an opinion on that? What’s your play on that?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, I’ve always paused, because I want to make sure that it stays in my account. If I do want to bring it back, like maybe if I’m running a product targeting ad for two weeks, and the ad cost is too high, maybe something wrong with the listing, so I would pause it, because I maybe want to bring it back, because there’s a belief out there that there’s history within that campaign, that Amazon has got history for it. When you do bring it back, you probably can gain back that whatever ranking you had for that campaign faster than you would with a new campaign, because there’s no history with it.

Personally, I pause them, and then inside … I keep talking about Sellozo, but inside Sellozo, I make a filter that says show me only active campaigns. Then, now, I can only see my active campaigns. Then, I make another filter that says show me paused campaigns, so that maybe if there is a paused campaign that had good sales at one point, I can test it again by just re-enabling it, and letting it run for a few more weeks, and see if it’s profitable. To answer your question, I pause them, because there could be a chance that I may want to bring it back again and test it further.

Dan Rodger:

Then, with these campaigns, there’s two pools of people. There’s one who they believe as many keywords as possible, get all of them, put them all in the campaigns. Then, the more keywords, the better performance. Then, there’s other sellers, I tend to sway to this side, where it’s really specific. I’m only looking for my best, best performers, but I’ll spend a lot on them. What’s your opinion on that? Let’s take, I know you’re doing the single keyword campaign, so that’s obviously one, but in terms of your broad campaign, how many keywords would you put in there?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah. Yeah, I’m not putting more than like 25 or so. That, maybe. That’s probably pushing it, really. The reason being is your budget, you want to give … One search term could take over all your budget. I mean, you may never get a chance to test those other keywords. When you’re doing your keyword research, if you do want to put a lot of keywords in a campaign, then I would suggest separating them out by search volume. If you’re going to focus on your top keywords, don’t put those in another campaign with your long-tail keywords, because that one’s going to take all the budget.

I label mine like BSR between 100 and 1,000, and I’d only put search terms in there, in that campaign. That way they’re not eating my other ones. If you do want to put a lot of keywords in a campaign, separate them out by search volume, making sure that they’re going to be within that same range. If you don’t know the search volume or you just want to test out some, just put maybe max 25. That’s still high for me, but that would be the max I would go.

Dan Rodger:

I totally agree. I think you can’t manage it. It’s too much. It’s overwhelming. I think it creates a lot of problems and confusion that doesn’t have to be there, so totally agree. Also, how many ways do you search for a product? Let’s be real. I understand there’s some long tails typed in like once every two months, but that’s not what you want to focus on. When people search for things, they generally use certain terms. Remember, on Amazon, and we all do this, when you start typing something in, they suggest, and you’re like, yes, that thing. That even limits how people search.

There’s very specific terms with the majority of traffic. That’s where you want to focus. I’m glad we have a similar approach on that. In terms of the campaigns and how often they run, do you have a goal for how much of the day that campaign should run for? Should it run the whole day or 70% of the day? If for a limited part of the day, do you prefer earlier or later in the day? What are your thoughts on that?

Kris Gramlich:

Great question. Obviously, Amazon starts the bid auction at the beginning of the day, and they run all day. Whoever has the highest bid is going to show up. If they have the budget, their campaign could potentially be visible all day.

What I’ve been testing and what Sellozo has incorporated is a feature called dayparting, where you can actually control the times of day your ad is being displayed on Amazon just by dragging and dropping certain times of day that you want your ad to show up. For example, we worked with a mattress company. They sell mattresses. Those are big-ticket items, but from what they have seen, a lot of their orders come at night, when people are laying in their bed, or on their phone, like, gosh I got to get a new mattress.

Dan Rodger:

Yeah, it’s because they can’t sleep. Their mattress is [crosstalk 00:37:46]-

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, like this mattress is terrible. They’re on their phone looking for a mattress on Amazon. What this company has done is they use our dayparting feature, and they pause their campaigns from, I don’t know, 2:00 AM to 6:00 PM. I think they don’t turn them on during that time. Then, they allow all their budget to be focused solely on that night time, when people are going to bed, or thinking about, they’re in their beds, and they’re needing a mattress because they have seen that they get a lot of their orders at night.

That’s a feature we have is dayparting. It’s only going to get better. We’ve been doing some tune-up to it, but it’s only going to get better. That’s where you can set it up, and for each campaign, we will automatically pause it and then re-enable it for you based on the times you select.

I’ve been testing it out. I’ve been saving my budget. I’ve been turning my campaigns off at midnight, and I don’t turn them on again till 8:00 AM. There’s eight hours there where I’m not showing up on any ads, but I’m saving my budget for later in the day when, in my opinion, conversion rates are going to be a little bit higher than they are in the early evenings. Yeah, that’s a feature that we have. I’m a big fan of it.

Dan Rodger:

Awesome. Then, we didn’t really specify this, but in terms of once optimized, once you’ve launched, you’ve got data, you know which keywords are good, perhaps you’ve done your single, exact match keyword campaigns, at that point of optimized running, what campaign type do you generally run, and are you still running little test campaigns, or is it generally moving to one campaign type? What is that?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, I’m generally focused on those top five keywords that I want to continue to rank for because if I’ve done my keyword research right, and I know what I need to focus on, I want to make sure my budget is focused on those. I would continue to run exact match, single keyword campaigns, just because I know I’m going to continue to rank for those.

I’ll have in the background, like again, that mining campaign, playing around with. I’ll do some product targeting, where I’m targeting my competitors. I’ll put my brand name in its own campaign. I’ll target specific competitor brand names in a separate campaign. There’s a lot of different match types I’m going with, but my main focus is definitely going to be on those single keyword, exact campaigns because I want to continue to rank for those because if I don’t, somebody else is.

Dan Rodger:

Sure. You mentioned ranking for a competitor’s brand name. I think this is something people also need to be a bit careful of. Often, you want to have the keyword on your listing, so that it will populate as a PPC ad. If it’s on your listing, in your campaign, usually that campaign will run just fine. When you do that, my question is, are you putting that competitor’s brand name on your listing? If so, where?

Kris Gramlich:

This is a touchy subject for some, but I’m not putting it in my listing anywhere, because I don’t want any type of red flag. I don’t want to get any type of issue with Amazon. I’m going to bid on it in a campaign because you could do that. Just be prepared, those bids and those brands, they know everybody else is doing this, so they’re going to be bidding just as high or maybe even higher. You may get a high ACOS. They’re going to be pretty expensive ACOS-wise.

I’m trying to steal a little bit of sales away. I’m trying to get some sales away. If I’m going to reorder a product, if you get one or two of those, those can add up, long term. Yeah, I’m not adding those to my listing, just because I don’t want any issue with that. I don’t want to get an email in the middle of the night saying my listing was suppressed and my sales tank. I’m only going to focus on in my ads. Now, some people may do this. Kudos to them, but I’m not going to play that game.

Dan Rodger:

Don’t. Don’t do it. I love your answer to this. I would really avoid that. Don’t put the competitor brand names on, not even in the search terms in the back end of your listing-

Kris Gramlich:

No.

Dan Rodger:

… in the keywords area. Just don’t add it. It’s not worth it. Then, Kris, are there any campaign types you just outright avoid and why?

Kris Gramlich:

Sponsored display. That has been a targeting type that has just … I haven’t seen any good metrics yet. Now, I only have access to the sponsored display with the views option. There’s other options you can get, like purchases, or traffic I believe is one of them, where people who purchased your item, you can re-target those. I haven’t tested that out yet, but I’ve heard that’s really good.

The views one I have never got to work. Sponsored display, I’ll keep it running, but I’m not optimizing it and trying to be aggressive with it. I’m only doing it like … To give you my strategy there, I’m only doing a sponsored display ad for one product. I’m only putting my bid at a quarter, 25 cents, and I’m not touching it. I’m not adjusting bids at all.

I’ve tested it out. I’ve raised bids, and it just drains my … That is a campaign type, starting out, I would avoid because it hasn’t proven anything to me yet. I haven’t seen any good data.

Dan Rodger:

Kris, is that the same as what used to be called headline search ads?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, that’s a great question. The sponsored display is a feature that shows off of Amazon, so it’s like if somebody goes to ESPN if they go to ESPN.com, your product would show up on ESPN. The headline search is sponsored brand ads. I love those, sponsored brand ads, and especially sponsored brand video ads. If you have access to video in your brand registry, video ads are fantastic. That’s something that Sellozo can automate, as well. The ones I’m more concerned about are the ones that are off of Amazon, and they’re displaying your product on other websites. I haven’t had any luck.

Dan Rodger:

I agree, yeah. The video ads, I think that’s huge. I saw them running on the front page of some keywords, and it’s just, it stands out a lot. If you do have a video, if your brand registered, add that video to your listing. It can go in the last picture spot. Use those, the video ads, as well.

Once you’re optimized, once a seller, let’s say some of those watching now are really trying to optimize their campaigns. They’re on their way to reducing ACOS, things like that that they want to now get under control. What would you say is a good, healthy ACOS to have?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, this is my opinion, but it’s your break-even margin. This is where, if you’re making 40% on it, you’re good, like I would shoot for 40%. The reason being is you’re going to help your product rank over time for all your keywords. I mentioned this a little bit earlier. If you’re focused on reducing your ACOS, yeah, you can do that, but you’re going to see your sales drop, too. Your sales might drop.

I always go after, and I always suggest going after your break-even profit margin for that product. If you have different products with different margins, then you would want to put those in separate campaigns, because they have different goals. My personal opinion is a good ACOS is your break-even margin because you’re exhausting all of it, as much as you can, to get sales.

Everybody thinks a good ACOS, 10%, 20%, 15%. I’m more looking at what my total ACOS is and what my return is because I want to continue to rank aggressively for my keywords because if I don’t, my competitors are on it. People are on it, now. Sellers are on it. They’re on their PPC. If I don’t do that, if I’m not aggressive enough, I’m going to lose my ranking, so I’m going after break-even because I want to continue to rank.

Dan Rodger:

Then, say someone were to be using Sellozo here. Let’s say I have your full service. How often can a seller expect Sellozo to actually be monitoring that account and those accounts? How often would they make changes? Then, do you tell sellers when you make changes and what those were? Just in the general monitoring and adjusting, what can sellers expect there?

Kris Gramlich:

Yeah, so it’s a daily thing. Each rep will go through all their accounts every day, and just track them, and see how things are doing, make simple adjustments. When I say simple adjustments, it could be like increasing your target ACOS for a campaign or lowering the ACOS for a campaign. We have different bid strategies you can do inside the app, as well. That could be a change.

Every day, a rep is going through all their accounts and just monitoring them, looking at them to see how things are going. Then, every week, all that rep’s accounts has a call with that rep to go over things that they have changed, whether it be target ACOS or bid strategy. We will never increase your budget unless that is something that is discussed during your onboarding call. If you as a seller are comfortable with your rep, as far as increasing budgets, that’s great, but we will never touch your budget because we think that’s more of a business decision. That’s your decision. You’re the seller. You know what pool you have to spend.

Dan Rodger:

I suppose that’s like, as you can set in the campaign manager, you can set an overall daily budget, so that’s a type of thing a seller would set with you, as well, and then, as long as it’s under that, you can make whatever changes you see fit.

Kris Gramlich:

Correct.

Dan Rodger:

Then, what about click-through rates, conversion rate? These are two things I find really interesting with PPC because we can get metrics that can help us improve either of those. Is that something you help sellers with, is looking more at click-through rate, conversion rate?

Kris Gramlich:

What’s good about Sellozo is we don’t have you come in and make rules for all your campaigns. You don’t have to make, after five clicks, do this, make this a negative keyword after that. You don’t have to make rules. We’ve already built in an algorithm. We’ve already got the algorithm built-in.

Click-through rates and clicks is some of the two things that we look at. There’s other things that, like product price is a factor that we look at within the campaign, because a $200 item and a $20 item, they’re treated differently, as far as how much you can spend on those before you start to get a sale. We look at the price, the conversion rate, the click-through rate, clicks. That’s all built-in within the algorithm.

Then, we will make adjustments based on those data points every day for you. If your click-through rate is low, it could be because the term you’re going after is just not relative to the product, so that is something we track inside there. We spend a lot of time with sellers going through their data for their campaigns on their onboarding call and on their managed call if they choose to do that. That’s all data we track inside there that they can see. Yeah, there’s a lot of data inside. To answer your question, we do look at those for sellers and give them suggestions.

Dan Rodger:

Then, lastly, what would be your biggest piece of advice for the sellers watching this? If you could give them one piece of advice for Amazon PPC, what would that be?

Kris Gramlich:

Subscribe to Dan Rodger’s YouTube channel and always watch all his videos.

Dan Rodger:

Thank you, but for real, what would you say? I mean, I know you guys know a lot about this. I spoke to you and the team, and I can tell this is like, you guys do this all day. We also know this is such a major challenge for sellers. It is a difficult thing, especially in the beginning, when you’re getting used to it. What would you say the biggest thing is that you would recommend to someone new to this, starting PPC, something they can just keep in the back of their mind as they start this, as they create their campaigns?

Kris Gramlich:

Test, test, test. Always start testing. Test different types. Always see, change your images for your sponsored brand ads. Always continue to try new videos in your sponsored brand video ads. Go after different keywords. Know your keywords. Always make sure your listing is right.

A poor listing is going to give you a poor performance on your ads, so if your listing’s not where you need it to be, if you haven’t invested in good photos, if you haven’t invested in good titles or bullets, or you don’t have a video yet, or you need to get sponsored brands, or you need to get brand registry, those are all things that are going to help with your PPC. For PPC, it’s testing. For Amazon overall, it’s making sure your listing is right because that’s your real estate.

Look at your listing as your office or your house. When people come over to your house, you want to make sure your house is spectacular, clean. It’s nice. Your office is clean. That’s what you want to treat your listing as. Always focus on improving your listing, and always test for PPC.

Dan Rodger:

I see a lot of sellers, they spend so much time designing the product with the manufacturer, and they make an amazing product. Then, the listing just lets it all down, because the customer can’t see it. They can’t see the physical inventory. They can’t see any of that work you’ve done behind, so it’s really important. Your listing has to be as good, and should probably be better than the product itself. It should really, really look great, so I totally agree with you. That’s the first stepping stone, then going to PPC. I agree with you. Test. Do different things. I really like what you shared today, as well, some interesting stuff, like the single word keyword campaign. I’m also going to be testing some new stuff, now.

Kris, I just want to say a huge thank you for coming on. I think you guys are doing an awesome job in the space. I’ve seen a lot of good reviews, heard a lot of good things. I know you guys are good dudes, as well. Remember, you guys can get 20% off their service if you’re interested. Just use the link below. Kris, thank you so much for coming on. Anything else you want to say before we close up?

Kris Gramlich:

No, I just, I appreciate you having me on. I appreciate the time. You do great work. You have great videos. Your YouTube channel’s fantastic. You’re probably the only, the few that are transparent in Amazon space. No, I have nothing else today, but I wanted to say, good stuff you put out. You’ve got good content.

Dan Rodger:

Thank you very much, Kris. I really appreciate that. We’ll keep it coming. Awesome to have you on here. I think this splits up the content, as well. It’s not just me in the videos. I think it’s going to be very, very cool to have some of the other people focused on helping sellers specifically with services and things, especially if they’re specialized like you guys are. I really like that, just having them come on after you share with the audience straight up what they do. I think it’s beneficial for everyone.

Thank you so much, Kris. I hope everyone enjoyed this one. Remember, like the video, if you got value here. Subscribe below. I will see you in the next video.