Kris and Dustin have David Zimmermann joining them to discuss Amazon Seller tools and how David is comparing all the Amazon PPC and Analytics tools to help sellers find which are the best.
See more of David’s comprehensive list of PPC tools at https://youtu.be/a2Yzl-VZhuo?t=1541
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– Hello everyone and welcome to episode 47 of “Two Amazon Sellers and a Microphone”. Today Kris and I have a great guest on with us from Berlin, Germany, David Zimmermann. David, what’s happening?
– Hey guys. Thanks so much for having me, it’s a great honor 47 already that’s a lot of episodes.
– Yeah.
– Congrats for that.
– We’ve been busy. I mean the last time you and I spoke, we hadn’t started the podcast yet but. Right we’re excited to talk to you because man you are just knee-deep in research on Amazon Tool and the Amazon Space. So we’d love to just sort of get your insight on what’s just going on in the industry right now and what cool things you’re seeing. But before we dive in, you wanna give everybody a little background on sort of how you got into the Amazon space and what you’re doing right now.
– Sure. So actually I studied something along of sports and business administration but you know, you don’t get jobs in sports. So I kind of ended up at SellX and I guess you all know that’s one of your competitors.
– Yeah.
– And yeah there I was four years, you know. Handling a lot of customers and then kind of customer success. I guess similar to what you guys are doing more or less. You know, creating knowledge base articles and doing all this stuff like that to make it easier to onboard customers. Especially in terms of Amazon advertising and then after four years, things ended with SellX and I decided to go my own way and I decided to kind of do something new. You know I checked obviously what is there on YouTube? Obviously, there’s a lot of affiliates out there. A lot of you know, reviews of tools but I just didn’t think that was satisfying enough and so I had my sheet, I already had that before, you know. And then I guess one night I just had that idea, dream or more or less whatever. Of a league. To make a league out of it. Me being a big sports fan. And yeah that’s how it happened. I just thought, okay, let’s do it. I’m sure one or two people will appreciate it, and yeah a bit more people than that liked league and had to do it in some way.
– Yeah turns out a lot of people really benefited from it just to give a little backstory the way that you and I met David is you reached out to me because you were getting ready to create this league and you’re basically auditing and reviewing all the different PPC tools out there. And then you sent me this spreadsheet and it was the most extensive review spreadsheet you were asking for every possible. You tell about what Sellozo did and I thought holy cow this guy’s onto something.
– And then we had your doubts. What my motivation was.
– Yeah what’s he up to? And then you release the video and it was the most comprehensive, I mean you found every software provider out there that was doing PPC automation for Amazon Sellers, and you–
– Not every video–
– Almost it was extensive I can’t imagine the amount of time you spent on it and then you released it, like you said, you ranked them based on the tools they had. And it’s kind of put everyone into a competitive mindset about trying to move up your rankings. I mean it was impressive and it served the Amazon Community very well for sure.
– Thank you. Yeah, that was my goal and I think, I mean like I said in the video you know, a big part of it is also to see who is actually working hard on the tool, who is still improving things. You know there are certain tools out there I think I’m not sure about the PPC space, but like in the profit space, which is another video that’s coming up where there’s a lot of tools not really continuing to work on their software and you know we’ve actually saving what they have and then looking at it in one year again and see what’s new. You can finally see, you know what’s changed then who is actually working. So yeah I’ll be very curious for the 2021 video and curious what’s of course what Sellozo has worked on since then and well.
– Yeah, yeah we’re working on stuff and we use this sheet as a way to add more features cause you know, there’s a time period on the sheet and I’m looking at your YouTube channel now. I’m like all the videos you have that video that you created almost as 6,000 views and I know when you type in, when you go to YouTube and you type in Amazon PPC tools, it’s like the first thing that shows up on the results. So a ton of people are watching it. We’ve seen traffic from it. I’m sure other tools are seeing traffic from it. So when you were going through that process, how’d you get all the information, were you going like were you watching like, were you going through calls with each tool to get all that data? Like what would that look like?
– Yeah, pretty much. I mean first I did some very basic homepage reading and home you know, knowledge base checks what they have and what not then to go into detail and you know is it a super, or is it just a part, do they have it for sponsor products, automatic campaigns, and manual campaigns and you know all that stuff there. I obviously needed to do those costs to actually ask the questions because those are things that you’re not always gonna see on the homepage. People they’re not gonna mention that their you know rules don’t work for automatic campaigns, for example. So yeah I did these calls with almost all tools not the ones at the bottom because I didn’t think it mattered too much. You know if they’re like, I don’t know 27, 429 from the end but at the top, I did care you know I wanted to be as exact as possible. Yeah. That’s I went and you’ve been there Dustin.
– Oh yeah. I remember that call.
– Hours or so I don’t remember.
– You are very very thorough. I mean, we were debating on certain people, this is this count as that feature, you know it does do that. I mean and you were, you know, we had those good debates and so right now you’re doing this again. You see you did it originally for PPC automation tools and now you’re doing it for Profit Tools. You know that there’s a lot of Profit Tools out there I’m sure. and it’s interesting to see, it’d be really cool to see the results of how this comes out because you know, that’s the thing with it was selling on Amazon is a lot of times the data that you see and the way things are displayed inside Seller Central you don’t get the full picture. It’s hard to see and so utilizing can make a huge difference in how you can manage your own business.
– Definitely and you know Sellozo will actually be as far as I can tell one of the few that now will be in both videos. So that’s going to be exciting. I can’t yet say if you’re gotta be as good as the PPC one, it would be surprising to me because I mean, it’s difficult for each software to have that focus and to be really good in all those spaces. So yeah, it’ll be also curious where Sellozo ends up there but yeah it’s exciting. It’s 30 free profit tools if you’re interested, not as well done as many as PPC but yeah.
– Yeah we’ll definitely get that chip filled out for you to get it over to you. So you can definitely rank us on there. What are some things that you’ve seen sellers do or some mistakes that sellers are making when they do their Amazon PPC, you know there’s different types of Amazon PPC, what type of things should sellers avoid when doing PPC?
– Wow that’s a big question. I mean there’s a lot of things to avoid really. First and foremost I did a video about that. Number one mistake, in my opinion, is, you know not having a campaign structure, basically just having one automatic campaign perhaps in one manual and you have absolutely no control over budget but you have all those broad keywords, all those exact keywords phrase keywords in one manual campaign, and then you try to increase your budget for what’s working well but you increasing it for everything. You know all for the research keywords basically there not to make sales as a first goal and yeah so that would be the first mistake. I have a whole list of mistakes that I’m kind of going through to make videos about them actually. So I mean I can talk hours about that, but a campaign structure, really number one. And we’ve that obviously kind of comes, you know using harvesting and using tools to harvest those keywords into that reading to those campaigns and you know making use of that campaign structure because you know if you don’t actually make use of having those different kinds of match type keywords in a different key in different campaigns you also don’t need to do the harvesting cause you can just you basically can just keep your automatic campaign going but since you do wanna make use of it, you also wanna you know go there harvest into the right campaigns, increase the budgets for the right campaigns when it’s working. So yeah.
– What will be the structure like if I have a limited budget like, you know $1,000 or $1,000 a day to spend or whatever a limited budget to spend what would be like a good beginner campaign set up? Like do I just do an auto or a manual exactor or do I just focus on exact match? What would be your suggestion there for a limited budget campaign?
– Limited budget campaigns? Well personally I have my checklist, you know if the budget is very small yes I start with one exact campaign. That’s the one I always have like with some group of highly relevant keywords but then ideally you also wanna have that automatic campaign as the next one, kind of a lower budget to keep researching those keywords. So if you really have a very, very low budget, then at least have those campaigns exactly automatic, but then there’s so many other campaigns. I mean you’ve known it you know many advanced people do around 40 campaigns per product. So it can go depending on how much budget you have and I’m not sure that would take it a bit too far for this video.
– Yeah you can certainly design pretty complex campaign structures. There’s no doubt and that is you know, what a lot of the big players are doing. Like you mentioned, they have lots of campaign structures going on in terms of Kris and I talk about a lot with people when we’re demoing Sellozo just talking about automation, like the tools like Sellozo that automate the optimization process they will do whatever strategy you design, you know so if you’re like trying to be aggressive or you’re trying to rank they’ll do that. And I think a lot of times people assume that a tool is just the magic button. If you just turn it on but to use a tool properly, you need to understand what strategy you’re trying to implement and then the tool becomes your best friend. It can help you, it can do all the work, the busy work for you to implement that strategy. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, do you run into that a lot where you people are looking for some magic button and what do you think about that?
– Yeah that is so true. I mean especially when I think about all those you know agencies and you know maybe single managed service people that really are against automation tools because they I don’t know, they say it just cares about ACoS or doesn’t really look at the whole picture. It’s you can’t trust it and all that stuff but the thing is by now most of these tools are so advanced. You can really set it up the way exactly you want it, you know there’s rules that really only do exactly what you would do otherwise manually anyway, wait for enough clicks for changes to happen and you know to care about certain thresholds and minimums and all that. So there’s almost no excuse not to make life easier with automation and yeah.
– Yeah nice.
– Completely completely agree and you know that’s how Sellozo is designed it’s designed to automate those strategies that you want to implement and it will and yeah and it’s hard when you see that people look for the magic button, they’ll come on and they’ll say I want my target ACoS to be 1%. Oh, that’s not gonna happen. I mean–
– And don’t be surprised if your bids go to 1 cent to get your ACoS of 1%.
– Yeah you hit it. You hit your target ACoS of 1% and you’ve got no sales.
– Exactly.
– Exactly that is I do think that that is an issue sometimes with what people looking for the sort of a magic button but if you come into you to easing automation with the right mindset or you’re really wanting to just, hey I can design this strategy and I don’t have to daily pull these search term reports and make adjustments. The automation can just be amazing for you.
– I have yet to hear a good reason not to use an automation tool so.
– Yeah. That’s a good point right there. Yeah, there is for sure not really good reason not to use it.
– I mean at least a minimal way there’s certain basic rules that you just wanna set up at least you know if my ACoS is too high okay decrease the bids a little bit at least you know just you don’t have to go crazy with the rules but yeah you wanna have some safety net and the rules are just great.
– Exactly.
– We’re running into that a lot where people think that we’re gonna automate their campaigns immediately from day one. It doesn’t work that way. There’s things you have to set up at the very beginning and one of those things is like bid adjustments that are gonna happen every day and that’s a simple test just to get rid of like Dustin and I both done this manually and we used it to do our campaigns manually. It just took forever. Took hours.
– I will myself if I ever go back to doing that stuff manually again for my clients.
– It seems like it that’s the way this is going. Like the Amazon PPC space is having some sort of like automation tools sellers are getting aware of it. They’re using tools like Sellozo and other tools out there that you reviewed. So it’s nice to see that that came around cause back in the day when we were starting Dustin, they didn’t have tools like this did that.
– No.
– Yeah I mean even bulk operations out of course takes a bit of work out of it but still, that’s a lot of manual work as well. So I really don’t see any good reason not to use it.
– So next for you right now your focus is on reviewing Profit Tools. So what are you seeing in that space in the Profit Tools, tool space, are you seeing just a lot of growth in these tools and what they’re doing and just talk about what does a Profit Tool do for a seller?
– Yeah that’s an interesting question. I mean it’s gonna be the first video for profit. So there again I cannot yet say which tool is actually working. That’s the thing that’s really interesting to me. I’ll be able to say that in two years, right. When we see the difference but as far as I can tell and looking at the homepages and I’ve had to look at them obviously throughout the years, I think a lot of them still look exactly the same. So I am expecting there to be less development and I think all tools are many tools are really going towards that advertising space because that’s just, they see that’s the biggest movement. You know Amazon is working tremendously there and profit there’s not that much you can do anyway. You can I mean you can all the features that I have in there and that sheets but after that, there’s not much, what are you gonna do after that? And advertising you know Amazon keeps on giving new types of advertising coming out seemingly every two weeks. So yeah, we’ll see.
– Well I do think that Profit Tools are important because Kris and I know a lot of sellers where they’re not even aware that their product is unprofitable, right? Cause there’s so many fees costs. I mean when you’re doing things like I’m right now in the midst of I’m launching a new product, I’ve got coupons out there, I’ve got discounts all over the place. You know you’ve got giveaways and all this different stuff that you’re doing to actually figure out where your profitability lies. Like especially at that product level let alone your full account take some digging into and profit tools can make, I mean I use obviously Sellozo. I can get a quick look inside Sellozo and see the profitability, the exact true profit, true profit margin of that product for a certain timeframe, and yeah that makes all the difference in the world.
– Yeah absolutely. I mean oh so from a PPC guy perspective that’s why I’m also doing the research. I mean I’m always doing the research for myself as well basically to make life easier for me as the guy that manages PPC for people, you know for profit I really I’m looking for things like, does it show me the break-even ACoS for example or do I that’s kind of more advanced, but do I see things like customer lifetime value? Because obviously, that could go so into the ACoS calculation if it’s not just the sale that I look at per product per sold unit, bill the other units that come after that, that will if I know that I can obviously bid a lot higher on my keywords because there’s just more revenue to come afterward. So things like that, I would also hope from a Profit Tool but at the very least, at least tell me you know, am I profitable with all those things with the ads? And yeah let me know if I can basically spend more on my ads without doing losses.
– So when is this video plan on releasing for the Profit Tool?
– It depends on tools like yourselves that are not ads, are not completed by sheet yet.
– We’re doing it right after this call. We’ll keep you on and we’ll go through the spreadsheet with you.
– No, I have to inform some of the tools I have to push a little bit obviously not all of them know me, you know? So some of them are suspect. I still have to explain to them yeah, know it’s gonna be neutral. I’m not a competitor am not like I don’t know spying on you just for somebody but yeah.
– Well that’s a good point that you bring up because we talked about this right at the beginning, when we first met is your adamant about being neutral, just you want to look at everything and give an honest review of all the platforms out there and that’s a huge benefit to the Amazon Community.
– I would hope so. Yes, that’s my big goal to kind of be perceived as that as well as intercede I guess. And yeah I just you know I do it for myself like I said and then why not also get some publicity out of it as well?
– Well it keeps everybody on their heels you know like keeps everybody on working on their tool so that I know in the PPC space, people are looking at this graph and they’re like how do we get our tool better? How do we move up the ranking? I hope the same happens in the profit space cause a good Profit Tool would be nice to have too. So I can’t wait to see that video. It’s gonna be nice.
– So the work you’re doing is great, man. I mean it’s motivating us, it’s pushing Sellozo to be better and I know it’s doing the same thing for everybody else. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, tell everyone how do they contact you or where can they find your videos? I know you’re everywhere but tell them how they can see your content and get in touch with you.
– Yeah well so if you enter in YouTube: DDZIM.PPC, I’m not sure they can see that in this video.
– Yeah. We can do that right here yet and we’ll put a link as well.
– Yeah that’s pretty much how on and of course like everybody pretty much nowadays LinkedIn is the place to be so yeah just hit me up on LinkedIn.
– Yeah I encourage everybody that’s listening. You gotta go watch these YouTube videos that you’re putting out. It’s great stuff so.
– Guys you not too bad either.
– That’s why we’re having you on to make our podcast even better. Yeah but man hey thanks for coming on. It’s been great. Well, thank you everyone to go out there. Kris, did you have something else you wanted to add?
– No, that’s good. I was just saying we’ll put a link in the notes for his YouTube channel, his videos are very neutral. It’s awesome content. So yeah.
– Want to get the title of this video? I can’t really summarize what we talked about.
– Its title is gonna be ‘Amazon Seller Tools with David Zimmermann’. We kind of covered a little bit you know PPC.
– Competition for me in the search engine of YouTube.
– Oh man well thanks so much for coming on. We had a blast stay on here after we get off. Cause we’ll look and look through that spreadsheet. Get you all the information on.
– Sure.
– All right, everybody thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening and we hope to see you in the next episode. Have a great day.