📥 Pathfinder Bulletin - August Recap 2022
AMZ Pathfinder
We help great brands scale with Amazon advertising | Amazon PPC Management | Amazon DSP Services | Amazon Store Builder
Fresh Amazon Info 🌱
We are late to the party but luckily we brought data from spending millions on Sponsored Ad placements, valuable insight, and chicken wings!
Our 90-day Quarter 2 Ad Report will give you a macro look into the changes made in the ad landscape year over year.
If you’re an Amazon Seller looking to squeeze the value out of every ad dollar you've invested into advertising, check out what trends we followed, strategies we implemented, and lessons we learned from managing ads for 60+ partners.
We’ve been bullish on this new Google Ads opportunity for the last several months. Many of our clients have already found profitable success utilizing Google Ads for their Amazon catalog but if you’re curious about why this off-Amazon strategy trend is making waves, watch our BeyondPPC episode with Tyler Gregg of AMPD.io.
We explain the overall strategy, implementation, and use cases for brands that found success with Google Ads for their Amazon listings. There have been some pretty exciting developments in this space recently and we're happy to share.
Dealing with support issues through Seller Central can be an endless and time-consuming nightmare when you’ve got a long list of tasks you could be doing for your Amazon business instead.
In this episode of the Beyond PPC podcast, we interview John Cavendish, the CEO of Seller Candy. We talk about the struggles of Amazon Support, how to circumvent challenges to resolve common tickets, staying up to date with new Amazon features, and more!
Like any service business, building an Amazon PPC Agency from scratch is no easy feat.
I was invited to the Nomadz video podcast Hosted by Lucas Kwiatkowski to share stories and insights about starting an Amazon PPC agency, the differences between Full Service and PPC-focused service, hiring a full team for the agency, the ins and outs of PPC agency processes, and much more. Thanks Lucas for the chat!
Among the most vital parts of the campaign creation process is keyword research. This step is so crucial that it can make or break the campaign.
But while most advertisers have a set of steps for ad creation such as drafting the copy and designing creatives, everyone seems to have different strategies when it comes to keyword research.
But before putting those keywords to use, you must first consider an important question: How many keywords are enough keywords?
In our guest blog with Brand Builder University, we talk about the importance of determining the number of keywords in your ad campaign, the dangers of keyword dumping, the effect of keywords on your Amazon PPC campaign budget, the perfect number of keywords to use per ad group, and how AMZ Pathfinder strategically approaches ad group keywords.
Speaking of keywords, having the right ones in the right places can be the difference between appearing on page one or being lost in the jungle on page six.
Targeting highly relevant keywords that your competitors are leaving on the table is one path to Amazon success.
With ZonGuru’s Listing Optimizer tool, you can ensure you maximize your keyword reach so you can outrank your competitors and significantly increase sales.
It is the only tool in the world that guarantees you can optimize your listing to compete with the best on page one. Try Listing Optimizer for free today and watch your Amazon rankings soar.
Amazon News 📰
After going through a rough patch post-pandemic and with rumors of acquisition (including by Amazon itself) swirling about, Peloton rocks up on the Amazon marketplace in a big way. Looking at their store and product pages, all show quality A+ content from day 1.
They must have worked with Amazon before launching to make that happen, showing that star power can still get you somewhere with Amazon. Despite that, their pages have the same ad slots full of competitor products that the rest of us do 😄
Is this a sign that big-name DTC brands flush with investor cash are coming to Amazon or a symptom of the problems Peloton is facing as they suffer from too much inventory?
Speaking of quality A+ content, Premium A+ is available for registered brand owners for a limited time promotional period. An example of Premium A+ can be seen here on the Bose QuietComfort headphones page.
To give an extreme example there's one brand that's always benefitted from princely treatment by Amazon and that is Apple. Note that on the AirPods Pro Product Detail Page there is not a single ad to be seen anywhere. Sign me up for that beta!
Recommended by LinkedIn
Bonus Twitter thread that dives into some financial details:
It’s shocking to see a company that sat at the #1 spot for so long fall from grace so suddenly but the story here is fascinating.
Lessons I took away:
Reselling, and perhaps retail arbitrage and dropshipping are decreasingly viable business models for selling on Amazon
Building a strong brand with unique products priced high enough to provide sustainable margins remains the best way forward. If Pharmapacks had pivoted to that strategy with all of their Amazon expertise brought to bear they could have built something that had the potential to last.
This lively 🌶️ discussion highlights a few common themes around ADSP we see:
That last one is something I’ve been pushing on for years. Amazon hasn't done a great job of making it easy for brands to understand the downstream impacts of well-run high and middle-of-the-funnel efforts on ADSP. This is directly related to the first two complaints.
Since clients can’t have a direct look at the ADSP campaigns and rely on their agency or Amazon themselves to explain how the campaigns are going, there is also this sense of a lack of visibility. Of course, this also depends on the agencies' reporting.
Reports in ADSP have steadily improved over the years but I predict what will make a massive difference in the next 6 months is Amazon Marketing Cloud. We are using this now and will have an in-depth explainer post on it soon.
On a positive note, ADSP received accreditation from the respected Media Rating Council. This is for their Owned and Operated aka O&O retail properties ad inventory so the ads which appear on their website and mobile app and website.
This takes into account things like how the ads are displayed and what sort of invalid traffic filters they have implemented, all to ensure quality for advertisers using the platform (us).
Double checking this in a few accounts it works as described at the link. While not exactly groundbreaking in terms of new features, any opportunity to communicate with customers - especially less than fully satisfied ones - is welcome on Amazon. Since Amazon had made this so easy to do it seems like they’re giving tacit approval to us to go ahead and attempt to start a dialogue. Of course, explicitly asking for someone to change their star rating remains a big no-no.
Nerd Zone 🤓
As our management of paid traffic from Google to Amazon has grown we’ve learned more about Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus (BRB) program and its quirks. This matters a lot because for us to properly understand the full impact of our external ad efforts we have to know how much money clients are recuperating from Amazon’s incentives in addition to revenue from sales.
First you must enroll in the program and complete the "tax interview form" to get things setup. A common but false assumption is that you can just start advertising with the proper tagging from Amazon Attribution and start receiving benefits. This is not the case.
Amazon provides 10% as an estimated amount that you can earn from the BRB but in reality the percentage figure differs based on different categories, although most of your catalog likely will fall within just one or two categories so the percentages should be consistent.
Of course the biggest question we all have is "how do I actually see how much money we’ve earned?" Well, Amazon has a handy report for that which shows Bonus Earned, Bonus Paid, and where the Bonus was used at a per-transaction level. The catch is that payouts are delayed by two months as cancellations and returns are backed out. Once the bonus is paid it goes into your "pool discount account" and is automatically used as a credit against referral fees in future transactions. Effectively earning you the money that you’d normally have taken out of orders as referral fees.
It's all a bit nuanced but for some clients we've seen thousands of dollars in referral bonuses accumulate which represents substantial earnings on top of what are already positive ROAS advertising efforts.
That's all for this month. Thanks for reading! - Brent
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