267: The New Amazon Ads You Probably Aren’t Running Yet With Brett Curry

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today, I’m happy to have Brett Curry back on the show, Brett’s been on many times. And today what we’re going to do is we are going to cover an entirely new topic called Amazon DSP. Now, if you don’t know much about this new Amazon advertising platform then this episode will enlighten you.

But before we begin I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode whether you were getting your business off the ground or looking for new ways to scale Klaviyo offers fast simple and repeatable ways to grow and with Klaviyo, you can personalize your marketing build your customer relationships and automate your online sales and it is now easier than ever to create amazing email and advertising experiences. Now, I want to talk about Klaviyo is new entrepreneurial growth guide. It is packed with must read blog post case studies and getting started content. This guide will help you prioritize what to do next for maximum revenue growth now moving to a new marketing platform can be intimidating but Klaviyo helps you get up and growing fast, proven technology and countless support resources. Now, you can check out this free content now over at K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com/mywife. Once again, that’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com/mywife

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Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast Today, I’m thrilled to have Brett Curry back on the show. Now Brett is someone who I met through Drew Sanocki at the Traffic And Conversions Summit In San Diego a while back. He spoke at my conference, The Sellers Summit last year and he runs OMG Commerce which is an ecommerce agency that has helped over 125 companies with their pay per click advertising.

And I’m also happy to say that he’s speaking yet again at the Sellers Summit this year so if you want to meet the guy, you’ll see him in Miami on May 15th. Anyway, today Brett and I are going to talk about combining Amazon PPC with Amazon DSP which stands for demand side platforms to grow your Amazon business. If you don’t know what Amazon DSP is, stay tuned to find out and with that, welcome to the show Brett, how are you doing today man?

Brett: Steve. I’m awesome. Thanks for having me on really excited to dive into this topic is going to be fun.

Steve: It was great to hang out with you last week as well in person.

Brett: Yeah, man, that was great. That’s one of my primary reasons to do that event. Social media marketer. It’s a great event, but I love pain you know, guys like you and other speakers and it’s good time.

Steve: So Brett since you’ve been on the show before we are going to skip the intro this time around but what has been going on lately with OMG Commerce, where have you been seeing the biggest growth in advertising?

Brett: Yeah. So, you know, we’re growing as an agency. We’re up to 30 people now, which is super exciting and challenging and all that which is cool. So, you know, we primarily focus on two platforms. We were huge Google agency. That’s not talking about a seller Summit. So, Google search shopping YouTube lot going on there. On that side, YouTube is the piece that’s just kind of blown up for e-commerce Sellers and it’s been a lot of fun. I think we’re actually getting YouTube dialed in for e-commerce, which is great.

You know about going on three years ago now, when we started running Amazon ads or just a natural progression because we know search and a lot of similarities between sponsored product ads or now just called sponsor products, but those in Google shopping ads but less similarities. So serving those about three years ago and that’s been doing great. And we’re kind of leveraging some of Amazon’s new smart bidding. Some is not so good.

Steve: We’ll get to that. Yeah.

Brett: Yeah exactly exactly and you know Amazon DSP, which really we can talk about how it works and we’ll get into all that. But it basically the primary benefit is it allows you to remarket to people that visit your asons and don’t purchase. You can remarket to them with display ads that run across the web. And so that’s been that I spoke at Prosper Show recently James Thompson’s events event that we really well, but it’s mainly about DSP and a lot of Amazon sellers are pretty excited about the potential with that platform.

Steve: I want to ask you a quick question, since you run a ton of ads like how much has advertising increased in cost on Facebook Google and Amazon and just like the last year and what you’ve seen?

Brett: Yeah, it’s really interesting what we’ve seen with Google. So, okay. Let’s just talk Google in general. I think CPC’s have gone up. So if you look at search ads across the board. CPC’s have gone up. I believe though on the e-commerce side. It’s relatively mature. So if we look at Google shopping for back in 2012 to where it is today costs are definitely up but over the last year not a whole lot has changed because I think it’s reached a level of maturity where people are saying.

You know, because it is auction-based and you’re saying I can’t pay any more than this or that it becomes not profitable. So it’s kind of self-regulated. We did not see major increases for our search and shopping cost for most of our clients over the over the past year, but that’s because we’re running e-commerce campaigns. We still consult talk to like local businesses attorneys’ things like that. I think those cpcs are still on the rise to a certain degree.

Brett: What about Facebook?

Brett: Yeah, Facebook has definitely gone up and that that’s been a kind of a combination of Facebook restricting inventory. You know, trying to kind of clean up the feed and make users happy and you know, it looks kind of gone through a couple of crises but that stuff like going up right to the tune of about 30 plus percent. I don’t manage Facebook campaign. So I’m not in the platform very frequently. I understand it to a certain degree, but I know costs have gone up there.

We are seeing YouTube costs go up some so YouTube is one of those things where everybody’s excited about it. It’s actually we’ve got some ways to make that profitable costs are going up. And then with Amazon, so as we compare like CPCs are often higher with Amazon sponsor products and they are with Google shopping. But the conversion rates better on Amazon and so off probably.

Steve: Way better?

Brett: Yeah way better substantial better and some cases 3x better some cases. So the metrics still work but yet the CPC’s are almost always higher on Amazon and they are on Google shopping as an example.

Steve: Okay, and you know, if you guys didn’t catch the last interview that I did with Brett that was actually on YouTube advertising. So if you understand that you guys Check out that episode. I don’t have the number off the top of my head, but I’ll post in the show notes.

Brett: Great.

Steve: So Brett. What is Amazon DSP? What is it exactly?

Brett: Yep. So DSP, some people think it stands for like a display. It’s a shortened version of display. You do run display ads room is on DSP, but actually stands for Demand-side Platform, which will just means it’s self-service. So you get into the platform and you can build out your ad campaigns and things like that. And so basically what, it’s a layering of Amazon’s Shopper data.

So what they know about Shoppers and obviously hit they have millions of millions of Shoppers. And so it’s the layering of that data onto ad networks. So what we can do then is we can say hey I want to remark it to all the people that visit my asons either all of my asons or my top asons and I want to remarket or retarget those that visit those product pages and don’t buy and now, you know if they my product page and I’ll buy and a seminar on espn.com or MSN or something like that. I could run one of my ads to them to get them back to my listing.

Steve: This is very similar to the Google Display Network, right?

Brett: Absolutely. So it’s actually a combination of about seven networks plus some Amazon own properties. So it includes amazon.com also includes IMBD internet movie database, which is an awesome site if you’re researching movies. Amazon owns that then there’s Amazon publisher Services, which is a couple of kind of Comscore 100 sites that Amazon has control over. So that’s included.

And then there’s about seven open networks that Amazon participates in and allows you to run ads on. So basically those are other AD networks, you could advertise on on your own but what makes it kind of magical as you get the Amazon data that you’re using for your targeting purposes. So.

Steve: Just to be clear. These are the ads that kind of follow you all over the web on any arbitrary website, right?

Brett: Correct. Yeah. It’s standard retargeting. Right, which if You’ve been running your own website, you know, you potential been running retargeting for years and years. But sometimes Amazon will run retargeting ads on their own for your listings through vendor or whatever. But now this this gives you the option to do it yourself and it’s a pretty powerful.

Steve: Actually. That was my next question. I already see my ads follow around the web on Amazon, right Amazon’s running Those ads for me. So the question is why should I pay for them?

Brett: Yeah, it’s a great question. So one gives you more control right? You, you get to pick which of your products you’re going to retarget. Because Amazon is not retargeting every product that’s available on their site. So, you know, depending on who’s listening they may or may not have Amazon running ads for them at all. But usually Amazon’s not going to run retargeting ads for all of your products and not all of the time. So it gives you much more control.

Obviously you can see all of the data so you can see your cost per impression and your return on ad spend and all of that to kind of dial things in but ultimately just gives you more control and allows you to grow your business the way you want to grow it.

Steve: Do you have any visibility into because I still I notice an Amazon only runs Those ads for my best-selling products. Is there any visibility? Otherwise, if you’re not using their DSP platform.

Brett: Not that I know of, there may be something but I have not seen it. So that’s the other thing and I know you’re the same way Steve, but I love to see the data right? If we see the data, we know the data then we can make decisions and we know what to do. And so seeing that data is super important. Yeah.

Steve: How do I get access to this? And what are the requirements?

Brett: Yeah. So the requirements are actually a little bit steep right now. So you got a couple options. You can either go direct to Amazon and use Amazon’s managed Services where they’ll build campaigns. You’ve got a rep they’ll manage everything for you. We’ve had a few clients use that with different degrees of success, but the tricky part is they want to charge like 35 Grand minimum spend to get started.

Steve: Right.

Brett: So in that can be spent over a couple months, but 35k is kind of the minimum. You can also go direct. So DSP is the self-service platform you can get into that. Has a minimum too right now. It’s something at about 15K initial spends what they’re looking for. So that can be kind of steep for some people as well or you can find an agency like ours are there are others as well, but we meet all the minimum so we don’t have a minimum for people to run and test on DSP. So that, that’s an option as well. You also find an agency that has that direct connection to DSP and run your ads that way.

Steve: So just curious. Do you have to be brand registered like are than you requirements from the perspective of an Amazon Seller?

Brett: So you do not have to be brand registered. Yep. So that that’s not a requirement. You can actually run, there’s not a ton of restrictions on the ads you run. You could even run ads and direct people back to your website if you want it to.

Steve: Oh really?

Brett: Or or yeah. Yeah, they really are pretty lenient about that. It’s just a matter of you know, you’re paying for the you’re paying for the ads, but you can send them back to your site if you want. Or you can design your own ads obviously or you can kind of use ads that look like an Amazon listing and so that that’s typically what we do.

Steve: Well, so this is just like Google Display Network, except you have all the Amazon data.

Brett: Yeah.

Steve: You can take them anywhere you want you can put anything you want in the ad as well?

Brett: Absolutely. Absolutely and we’ll go ahead and fall apart.

Steve: I was just going to say can this be text-based as well as image based or is it just image-based?

Brett: Yeah. It’s all image-based right now. So you got kind of you know, the various sizes of image ads, you know skyscrapers and Banners and stuff like that, you know. The square ads 250 by 250. So yeah, it’s your standard display ad sizes.

Steve: Okay. And then can you target specific sites? Like how powerful is it right now?

Brett: Well targeting specific sites. You can Target specifically Amazon property. So if you want to choose Amazon and IMBD, or you can you can run just app ads inside the Amazon app. But we found that a lot of results from the open network as well. So we will build campaigns targeting both what kind of use your segment them, but the open networks work really well also.

Steve: What does that mean please? Open? What’s an open network?

Brett: Sure. So the open networks would be, networks, like AOL. As an example their ad Network or there’s other AD Network names that that basically they’re like an alternative to the Google Display Network. So it’s a group of sites where you could go directly to them if you wanted to and buy ads, but this is allowing you to run ads with those networks using Amazon’s data. Even cooler I think than placements because ultimately the placements are an important, aren’t as important as the people that you’re targeting right? So it’s really about the Amazon data.

What’s awesome is that it’s not just about targeting people the vizier asons or your product pages and then bounce without converting. You can also Target your competitors and you can also Target people that are just in the market so kind of shopping, browsing. So it’s really, I’m happy to break down those audiences for in kind of other words.

Steve: Yeah how do you the target your competitors?

Brett: Yeah. So this is yeah. This is one of the coolest thing so, you know, I’ve been in a Google guy forever, you know, and we’d always ask people are people always ask us. Hey can we retarget to people that visit our competitor sites in through Google Display Network, you know, the in the quick answer is no. You can build certain type of audience that sort of gets you close. It kind of builds a look-alike audience, but it’s called custom Affinity audiences.

But really you can’t you can’t quite retarget visitors to your competitor sites. With Amazon DSP, you can. So basically what you do you give Amazon a list of your asons, you know, either all of them or just the ones you want to advertise and then they’ll build a list of similar asons, right? They’ll build an audience of similar asons, which would be your competitors asons. And it’s actually an audience of people that have visited those asons but did not purchase. So it is literally retargeting my get people to visit.

Steve: Oh my Goodness..

Brett: It’s crazy.

Steve: That is crazy.

Brett: To clarify this like three times because the marker and me was nerding out when I when we first learned about it, but yeah, it’s people that visit your competitors asons and don’t buy. What’s also cool is that the audiences are updated in almost real-time. So if someone visits, you know, this competing spatulas page, they don’t buy now. They’re on my list for me to run ads to but then you know this afternoon they do by their taken off the list almost immediately. And so that audience type is extremely powerful.

Steve: That is crazy.

Brett: Yup, yup.

Steve: And then you can go those people back to your own site or anywhere you want to.

Brett: Yeah, anywhere you want, you know, usually we’re we’ve tested that somewhere we’re finding and obviously these are Amazon customers and Amazon Shoppers. So an ad that looks like your Amazon listing that points people back to your amp bacterium is on listing. Those do work best. But test whatever, you know, I’m always about testing to see what’s going to work.

Steve: Totally makes sense. So, do you have any numbers that you can share like what sort of results you’re seeing targeting your competitors? That sounds amazing by the way.

Brett: Yeah, it really is. So there’s a couple ways to look at the numbers. So when you run Amazon DSP get a couple different reports, you get kind of this direct sales report right that just shows people that click on ads and convert. And so, you know, we’re seeing in the high range of you know, 4x, 4x, 2/5x for those similar product targeting. So 400, 500 return on ad spend.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: Kind of on the higher side were seeing lows of you know 1 to 2, but that’s just people that click on the added by immediately. There’s also what’s called a brand halo effect. And this is something I’m sure you seen Steve and something that I’ve noticed forever. Once you start running ads, you’ll just see everything increase right direct traffic will increase. People you know, searching for you by name only increase things like that.

So that happens on Amazon, so Amazon will give ran halo effect report as well aware of the opinion. It’s a little bit greedy right now. I can I think it over Rapport so sometimes it’ll be like 3x what that is. So it’ll still say like a yeah 12x return on your ad spend when you look at the halo effect. I don’t know. I don’t know that I buy that so the truth is probably somewhere in between. Yeah, the results have been going out results for asons retargeting where your retargeting people to visit your products and don’t buy. That’s great. I mean that’s a no-brainer. I think that works for essentially everybody.

The similar targeting, you know or competitive targeting works for most people. But you’re not in all in all cases. So as an example for retargeting, I mean we’re seeing return on ad spend of 11, you know, 11x 20x from the direct sales report.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: You know, yeah. and then, and then the brand Halos higher but you know average your least 4x on.

Steve: That’s still pretty cool. I mean 11 X is crazy. These are just straight retarding ads where you just retarding back to the product they were looking at.

Brett: Yep. Correct, correct.

Steve: And are you able to put in your at exactly the product that they were looking at?

Brett: So no, so that that’s what okay, so so there’s a couple ways to do it. Basically what you’re doing is you’re Building audiences and audiences are based on asons. So you can either send Amazon single asons and ask for an audience for each ason or kind of a group of asons and ask for an audience around that group. And so if you their requirements as well, so you can’t do this unless you have Five thousand unique visitors per month to either one a son or your group of Aces.

Steve: I see.

Brett: So where that becomes tricky as if you’re kind of just getting started and I have a lot of traffic you may have to bundle all of your asons together to get an audience that’s sizable enough to Target. And then if you get a lot of different, you know use it you’re a sins are very different from each other that it may be hard to serve the right ad. Because basically you’re matching add to audience if that makes sense.

Steve: So basically it’s the dynamic aspect is not quite there yet?

Brett: You have to put there is not correct. There’s not a dynamic aspect. So it’s you building audiences and they can either be single product audiences or audiences based on a group of products. And then and then you have to run an ad to those people. Say there’s not a dynamic offering yet. I’m sure that will happen yet. That’s the way it works with Google and GDN which is a beautiful thing. So that will.

Steve: Force your Facebook already to so

Brett: For sure. Yeah. Uh-huh Yeah

Steve: So on these Ads like recently Amazon allowed you to run display ads on people, other people’s products right? And have control over that.

Brett: Yup, yes.

Steve: I’m just kind of wondering how that compares here?

Brett: Yeah. So those are those are really good. So those are from about the same thing and I think we are product charging.

Steve: Yeah. Product listing ads I think they call them? I don’t remember.

Brett: Yeah It’s a subset of sponsored products, but it is part of product targeting and just like with kind of like with Google Amazon changes the name of things, you know monthly it seems. But you can Target specific products and then, you know towards the bottom of the page your sponsored product or your sponsored listing will show there. And what we’re seeing with that is the results are really good almost identical to sponsor product ads that run elsewhere like in top of search and search results like that.

We are seeing volume is lower. So, you know some product targets work some don’t obviously but once we kind of down into the ones that work the returns are great. They’re just using not quite as much volume on.

Steve: Sure.

Brett: That’s but that is a great way to Target but that’s actually a subset of sponsor products. There is one other audience that was kind of interesting for display for DSP. And this is kind of a little a little broader. So, you know, we talked about funnels, you know, shopping funnels and things like that. I think it’s fairly instructive. But you know the top of the funnel that’s where people are maybe just becoming aware of your product or product options and then we’ll lower the funnel. It’s more of a comparison evaluation. I’m really shopping and comparing my options and then at the bottom its decision time. And that’s a, over simplified funnel, but we kinda get the idea.

So, you know retargeting that’s definitely bottom of funnel. The similar product argument that’s kind of mid funnel because that’s when someone’s doing some evaluating and they’re clicking on different products and trying to decide what to buy higher higher in the funnel than that is what’s called in-market audiences.

Steve: Uh huh.

Brett: So these are these are interesting. These are kind of based on category page activity. So basically you build, that you can build an audience of people that are in the market for organic dog food as an example. And that doesn’t mean that they necessarily clicked on specific asons or similar asons, but they were kind of on category Pages or there. They’re doing things on amazon.com to make Amazon say hey there in the market for organic dog food or there in the market for toys for kids ages 5 to 8 or whatever the case may be.

Steve: So they copied Google’s terminology here, right or is this? Okay.

Brett: Correct. Yep. Yep. So yeah in-market audiences at some of the Google builds as well. So this is a direct copy of that same thing happens though. Those audiences are updated in almost real time. So someone starts kind of shopping organic dog food there on that organic dog food in Market audience. Then later today, I you know, I buy my organic dog food now I’m off the list. So it does save you some money because what’s interesting about this platform versus others, is you’re actually paying for Impressions.

So we’re still seeing return on ad spend, you know, we’re really dialing in and looking at the return and all that and you can see CPC’s but you’re paying for Impressions so that that’s where it’s important that those audiences are updated in near real time.

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You know, this is really powerful a lot more powerful than Google in my opinion, right? Because people are actively shopping on Amazon in a category. So if I understand correctly this in Market is category based on Amazon.

Brett: It is category based. Yeah, and I totally agree like I mean, I love obviously love running Google ads and stuff. But Google will put someone in and in and in Market audience based on you know, what searches they’re making and what sites are clicking on but yeah, it’s kind of hard to tell exactly where they are in the process.

Steve: Yeah.

Brett: But your conversion rates are so high on Amazon. And so if someone’s on category Pages really browsing on Amazon that they’re likely to buy pretty quickly.

Steve: How did the returns look for the for the in-market audiences as opposed in targeting your competitors?

Brett: So as you could imagine, because this is a little bit higher in the funnel the returns are lower. So, you know, this is where we talk to advertisers whether it’s on the Google side of the Amazon side, you know, we like to say, okay we need to get an overall return that makes sense. Right? We’ve got to we got to watch our overall money spent versus money that we’re getting in sales, but we can’t necessarily the same goal for every ad type. Right?

Sponsored products. They should just kill it. You know, they should do great High return on ad spend or actually it’s sponsor products a measure a cost. So it’s you know low a cost but for in Market, that’s kind of top of the funnel see I don’t want to spend the whole lot like, you know, that’s a smaller budget item depending on how aggressive want to grow but the returns are lower. So, you know, we’re seeing on the high side like a 3X return on those.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: And again, this is this is direct sales. The halo effect is always larger, but but you know, you have to trust it and I don’t really think I do yet. To kind of an average of between 1 and 2x return.

Steve: That’s If you just try to keep the Amazon flywheel going, right?

Brett: Exactly. Yeah, you’re trying to say, you know, because the Amazon loves you getting traffic from outside of Amazon, you know that can help with Organic rankings and those wasps and all that. So again, we like to at okay, if we if we look at all of our ad types is kind of a portfolio and we need a total, you know, return an spinner total a costs. Then let’s see where we you know, we just put a little bit of money to in Market because we’re always getting new people finding new people that way and so.

So yeah, we use this very heavily around the holidays for a large toy seller and man it did well. It was it just crushed it which that makes sense kill the market around the holidays and toys and you know impulse type purchase. So that worked very well, but yet it’s exciting audience type. I do viewed as a little bit higher in the funnel and so you just have to kind of budget and plan accordingly because of that.

Steve: Are you able to calculate lifetime value of a customer with this platform?

Speaker 1: That’s not something that I’ve seen yet. I would love to be able to do that. I mean, the oh that’s the other thing. That’s the other audience that I forgot to mention is as you give Amazon a list of asons, they’ll give you know, your retargeting audience will give you similar products, but it will also give you buyers. So you can you can find hey this is this is my list of buyers for these asons. Now you can Market to them and try to sell them something else right?

Steve: Ah, yeah cross sales.

Brett: Exactly so, you know, I bought a guitar. I did not buy a case. Okay, let’s run ads for the case or I bought the eye serum but not the facial mask. Let’s run ads for the facial mask. So it’s another way to kind of yeah cross promote and cross-sell.

Steve: Can you market to people who have purchased your competitors products or just looked at them?

Brett: Yeah, right. Now it’s just looked at them so that. And used to like when we first started doing this we could give Amazon a list of our competitors. Like he wanted we want to target these guys can’t do that. Now, It’s just all automated you give Amazon you’re asons you want to target they’ll automatically build that similar list. But yeah right now it’s just people that have visited those products and have not purchased.

Steve: And what’s in clear me is you keep mentioning that everything is in real time in people getting taken off a list, when they’re taking off a list is that when a purchase occurs of any type?

Brett: Yeah, so it’s near real time. So I don’t know what the actual delay it is. It seems like it is same day which is which is interesting. But it should be a purchase related to that category. So the way the way it was explained to me and you know, there’s always some of the some of these things that a little bit Black Box, you know, where you ask questions and you don’t always get super clear answers. But the example was given to me on the organic dog food as an example.

So now I’m in the organic dog food I go ahead and purchase them. I’m not in Market anymore. But then in 30 days, I’m back in Amazon searching again on category Pages. Now, I’m added back to that in Market audience. So it’s definitely one that you can you can be added to it again, but it seems like it would certainly make sense that it’s related to that I purchase that specific product. Or a product in that category.

So I know when it comes to the similar audiences and stuff, that’s did someone buy one of those specific products in Market. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten confirmation, but I think would have to be a purchase in that category.

Steve: Do you get to set the duration?

Brett: Yes, there’s remember all the options that I know. I know the Google options a lot better, but you can, you can set the duration. Yes. And I think it’s I think it’s default 30 days if I’m remembering correctly, but you can modify that some not as much control as Google. So like with Google as an example, you know, we’re building sometimes three-day audiences and seven-day audiences and 14-day audiences and then being more aggressive with our targeting in different Windows. You can’t at this point. You can’t be that detailed with Amazon.

Steve: Okay. Can we talk about the creative little bit?

Brett: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve: Do you just take your GDN creatives and roll with it or do you create a fresh set just for just for these Amazon DSP ads?

Brett: Yeah, so we’ve tested it and you know Amazon DSP says, Hey run whatever you want. I mean obviously with some policy guidelines, but run whatever, you know, make the ad look like whatever you want to look like. So we tested it. We we’ve taken kind of our GDN looking, you know ads and we were Designers are really good really talented. And so we use some of those ads, but we also wanted to test you can kind of build these ads automatically in the DSP platform. It basically had just looks like your Amazon listing just you know, it’s got the Amazon add to cart button and it’s got the pictures from Amazon and ratings remember that just looks like Amazon.

Those ads always do better. They just do I I think it is one of those things that there’s some triggers there some visual cues or someone sees it I yeah, that was the product I was looking at. Even looks like the listing I was looking at and so the results are just better there. I think everybody still needs to test you never know but in our experience so far and we’ve done quite a bit of this the ads that look like Amazon there. Right now, they’re winning by a healthy margin.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: And they’re easy to build to because you just build a right there and DSP the not a ton of creativity. There you kind of decide you want to pull in your reviews or Price or you can have ads that kind of rotate and show multiple things. And so that’s what we’re doing primarily. But yeah, you can be as creative as you want and essential upload any add to test.

Steve: So these are just set templates like I want to display these three Essence and it’ll just put together an ad with add to cart buttons.

Brett: Correct. Okay, correct.

Steve: Does it add to cart when you click on it?

Brett: That’s a that’s a great question.

Steve: Or better yet. Is it one click sell, one click page?

Steve: That is what, no it’s not one click. That’s actually a great question. I haven’t clicked on the ads. I’ll confirm it. I’ll confirm that we can drop it in the show notes, but not actually certain on that. My thought is that it probably does go back to the product detail page. Yeah, that’s super interesting.

Steve: What other levers can you play in the ad itself that Amazon gives you?

Brett: You can add headlines. So there are depending on the ad size. You can add a headline. So even if even if you want it to look just like your product listing on Amazon’s, you get the picture and the reviews and you know, the Amazon looking buttons. You can still add a headline and test that and you’d be on the ad size that may or may not be eligible to show if it’s a smaller add than you have.

Steve: So do you create ads for like all the different ad types? There’s like a bunch, right?

Brett: Yeah. So when you when you go in and kind of build the basics, it’ll auto adjust to fit those different sizes. So but we do like to write headlines and that’s something that, you know been marketers for a long time.

Steve: Sure.

Brett: And we seen the power of one headline versus another even in search ads or on a landing page. So we do like to test headlines for sure and but you can also, so to clarify you can build specific ad sizes as well. So 300 by 300 whatever like you just build those sizes as well if you want. And you can get to the smaller skyscrapers or the smaller. I forget all the names of them, but you can just create those individually, and It’s one.

Steve: And on mobile as well, right?

Brett: Mmm. Yep.

Steve: And you can you control like I don’t want anything in an app or a game or anything like that?

Brett: So there are some controls you can you know, you can choose only on Amazon only in the Amazon app. You can choose only in these open networks. There are there are a few things you can kind of restrict on where your ads show. But it’s not quite the same as against it’s a GDN now, although I will say on Google. They’re getting a little more automated where they’re kind of automatically excluding things like, you know, sexually suggestive content or violent content. You kind of you can opt out of all of that if you want to. And that makes it pretty easy. So there are some controls with Amazon but not quite the same.

Steve: It’s really didn’t use it. Maybe they’ll get.

Brett: it is. Yes. Yes. Exactly.

Steve: So DSP like to get access to this two completely different site, right? You don’t get this from Seller Central for example, right?

Brett: Correct, it’s not in sort of central at all. It’s actually just obviously Google Amazon DSP, but it’s advertising@amazon.com and that’s when you kind of go and get some of the details and there’s some videos about it and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s separate from vendor or seller its own its own platform.

Steve: So I know you run ads like across the entire gamut, right? So let’s say I came up to you as an Amazon Seller. So let’s say I’m just doing 1 million a year. How do you prioritize the ad spend?

Brett: Yeah, it’s a great question. So same way I would do if I was talking to someone, you know using Google and so their own site. I want to maximize that bottom of funnel first, but specifically sponsor products. So our sponsor product ads what they used to be called so sponsor products and then headline search ads which are now sponsored Brands. You have to be brand registered for that though. So usually to maximize that or at least get that to where get some good volume the return is what you need it to be, I would prioritize that.

Steve: Sponsor products and headline ads. I know they’re not called sideline ads anymore.

Brett: But yeah exactly sponsor products and headline acts. Yeah. Those would be the primary drivers just because the return is so predictable and it just works. So then as you have..

Steve: About the product listing ones, I mean in my opinion, those for me have been the highest converting ones.

Brett: You talk about products targeting..

Steve: Yeah I’m talking about

Brett: Where you learn how to talk

Steve: Exactly. Yeah.

Brett: So those that’s a subset of sponsor products I can,

Steve: Oh okay. Yeah.

Brett: Sorry lumpy.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: Yeah, so I’ve got a lump that together but I totally agree. Those are those are awesome. And now you can Target those specifically which is really cool. So I would maximize the budget there before I would look at anything. That’s DSP related and then if you, so, you know that this will vary from seller to seller but maybe you’re saying hey 60% of my 60 to 80% of my ad budgets going to go to sponsor products in headline search ads with sponsor products taking the majority of that budget.

And then I’m going to take you know, 20 or mittens that maybe like 10 to 20 to 30% of my budget going to retargeting once I start doing some DSP. And then I would just use you know, and like that 10 to 15% range. And now that I’m doing math on the fly I’m not sure hundreds..

Steve: Haha

Brett: We always give we always give 110% Yeah, I don’t know. But then the rest would be targeting similar products and and in market and then you know, you can always shift things as you go. But I think that’s the allocation that makes the most sense. And that you can really grow as you get that bottom of funnel built out high converting, you know, consistent predictable ads really push those first and put most of your budget there. And then start with a small amount and then ramp up as you see results with other, you know audiences and add types that are a little bit higher in the funnel.

Steve: So let me ask you this. Typically when I do retargeting like I do it based on duration, right? Like if they looked at the product within the last three days seven days 14 days and 30 days. Can you do all that stuff and ESP as well?

Brett: Not quite that detailed and I totally agree like that’s exactly what we do on the Google side will split even you know, product detail page viewers, versus cart abandoners and put these tight Windows on it. And will be be super aggressive for that narrow window and then we’re less aggressive as we go. So right now no you cannot be that specific.

Steve: Okay. So basically it’s just kind of like this blanket 30 days.

Brett: Right.

Steve: Okay

Brett: Right. Yep.

Steve: I mean this is new I imagine all that stuff is coming on down the line, but that’s just the way

Brett: yeah and depending exactly and so he like depending on when someone listens to this maybe Amazon or at least they’re releasing new things all the time and we’re actually we found out we’re fastest-growing Agency on Amazon DSP. So I get to go to the Amazon headquarters with my.

Steve: Whoo Hoo!

Brett: yeah going there next week with my..

Steve: Can you take a fellow Asian guy along too. I’d love to

Brett: Dude, Come on man, come on yeah. Let’s do it.

Steve: While we were chatting earlier before I hit the record button you were talking about like Amazon’s automated bidding and your experience with that. You want to just comment on that real quick.

Brett: Yeah. Sure. So this is one of those new things for primarily for sponsored products right where, we’re all we’re always a fan of testing new things were pretty big believers. In Ai and machine learning and it just because we’ve seen what that’s done on the Google side and how that’s changed performance there. So as an example to make a comparison on the Google side, they go uses smart bidding. Specifically Target return on ad spend or Target CPA and that’s basically where instead of getting up and getting down on your own. You’re giving the Google algorithm a Target.

So hit five hundred percent return on ad spend and then we found the algorithm now is so good. It will dial in and hit that row as maybe exceed it and help you get more volume. so really powerful there, but what was interesting is that first came out though, it kind of sucked like for about a year and then it got better and better and now, it’s so good. Google leverages all kinds of data that you won’t be able to ever see as an Advertiser. They’re looking at, you know, 70 million signals that they’re kind of calculating it at auction time, you know some cool stuff.

Well, I would kind of you Amazon as being at the same place we tested the bit up, bid down feature for kind of our top 20 advertisers or so. Just a little bit on a few campaigns here, there and the results were interesting to say the least so..
Steve: It usually means negative But yeah, yeah.

Brett: Yeah. kind of yeah. Yeah. So the 50% of the campaign’s just went nuts, haywire, like spending a lot just going crazy. So we pretty quickly mix those about 30% of the campaign’s just fluctuated too much too much volatility. Like there be one week where they’d be Okay one week where they would just do weird things. We couldn’t explain, so all-in-all now, you know like 20% did okay. But anyway to date we only have about 10% of a campaigns we started with actually still use the bit up and down functionality.

So just a tiny fraction of our campaigns overall. We manage are actually using that using the bit up and bid down functionality. Here’s what I know about machine learning and I’m not a programmer not a computer scientist, but the one thing that machine Learning Systems need to perfect their craft is data, right? They need lots and lots of data my advice to people listening is, let other advertiser’s Supply Amazon with data for right now. I would probably avoid it, you know, maybe test it with the campaign or two just to see how it does for you.

But overall it just increased spending and increased a cost that that’s what we saw that those kind of end of story. So I think it will probably get there, you know, if because Amazon’s pretty smart lots of other scientists and just some really smart people. So it will probably be a tool that will be useful maybe you know in the next year is the results will change but for right now I would say proceed with Extreme Caution and probably. Just wait a bit the bit down only which is kind of been around for a while that still works well. But bit up and down is a I would give that a strong caution and probably just avoid.

Steve: So Brett you’re going to be talking about Google shopping at the soda Summit this year. And I’ve been asked this question in the past, and I’ve never tried it so I don’t actually know the exact answer. I thought take the opportunity to ask you right now. People have been wondering whether you can run Google shopping for an Amazon portfolio of products on your site where you’re actually linking direct to Amazon in your feed. Is that possible?

Brett: That is not currently possible.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: So Amazon has been kind of in and out on running ads themselves in the Google shopping results for longest time. They would not run Google shopping ads and then they were and so that’s kind of on again off again type of thing. You can run Google search ads to your Amazon listings and we do that a decent amount. It’s a great way to get you know, people off of Amazon to your listing and increase velocity and ranking and all that.

It’s hard to track currently, you know, because you can see the click and cost data inside Google but then you can’t connect that with conversion data because the Amazon and Google, you know won’t connect to each other that way. But you can only do that if Amazon isn’t already bidding on your keywords. So Google’s policy is for any given keyword, they’re only going to show one ad for a given domain. So if Amazon’s already bidding on ads for your top keywords, then you’re likely not going to be able to run.

Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still create it because you know Amazon may be bidding in such a way that you would win the auction versus them or what have you but you can’t have an ad and Amazon have an ad both to your listing or both just the Amazon for the same keyword so search yes with those caveats shopping ads to Amazon listings, No.

Steve: Okay, even if this is the structure that was thinking like even if the shopping at takes them to a page on your website on your domain with the add to cart button leading to Amazon?

Brett: You can totally put that yes, you can do that. Yep

Steve: But it’s just not track, the conversions aren’t trackable?

Brett: Correct and you can’t see it and we’ve had some clients that have done that where you know, they’re get their listing on the shop store, you can check out there or you can check out on Amazon. and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You may get overall more conversions, but it will make the data a little bit a little bit messy. There is a kind of preview some of that’s kind of cool that’s not really ready for prime time, but it is interesting. Have you heard of Amazon attribution?

Steve: Nope.

Brett: It’s a new tool. We’ve got done now several webinars kind of still in beta right now, but basically it’s a way to track campaigns off Amazon and see whether those people convert on Amazon. So basically, it’s just pixel-based but you’re creating pixels for

Steve, Oh yeah yeah, I have heard of this. Yes, yes.

Brett: Yes, it’s really cool you can search campaigns. It’s for criminals work on Facebook, but for Google search campaigns or the display campaigns or whatever the only not the only one of the drawbacks is it only works for vendor right now? So if your Seller Central you can’t use it, but it’s coming, you know Amazon’s working on in perfecting it’ll be available for everybody at some point.

So once that’s available. Now you can start tracking and seeing okay this campaign did lead to these conversions on Amazon. So that that has the potential to be a game-changer as we’ve kind of demo to I think it’s going to be a potential little bit confusing a little bit messy in the beginning but promising for down the road for sure.

Steve: Cool. Well Brett where can people find you online if they have more questions about DSP or anything advertising related.

Brett: Yeah. Would love to connect left to talk Amazon DSP one of my favorite topics or sponsor products. Or I can connect you with the true wizard of all Amazon ads and OMG Chris Tyler’s our director of Amazon, but go to omgcommerce.com. It’s the best place and info their info on Amazon ads. Reach out If you’d like to schedule a free consult, happy to do that, and then you can actually on LinkedIn. I’m also on Facebook happy to connect with fellow Amazon sellers and marketing nerds alike. Happy to connect.

Steve: Cool. Well Brett. Thanks again for coming back on the show.

Brett: Yeah, man. Thanks for the invite had a blast and I really appreciate it.

Steve: And I’ll see you in a month and a half. It looks like.

Brett: Yeah, just a few weeks excited about it.

Steve: Alright, man. Take care.

Brett: Okay. Thanks Steve.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode now. I’m pretty excited about Amazon DSP because Amazon has so much shopping related data that you can use to drive targeted traffic anywhere you want. For more information about this episode go to mywifequitjob.com/episode267.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

I also want to thank Kaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Kaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Now. I talked about how I use all these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six a mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com