💌 Pathfinder Bulletin - February 2023 in Review
AMZ Pathfinder
We help great brands scale with Amazon advertising | Amazon PPC Management | Amazon DSP Services | Amazon Store Builder
Fresh Amazon Info 🌱
Advertisers on Amazon are faced with new challenges all the time as the platform is constantly moving underneath our feet. What worked well a year ago may not do so hot now.
To help with these challenges, we presented four tactics backed up free tools that we straight-up giveaway at the end of the webinar.
Who is "we"? Well this webinar features Michael Facchin from Ad Badger, Elizabeth Greene from Junglr, and Gonza Martinez from Ziresquare along with me (Brent). We are the founders of CORE, a new community based entirely around Amazon marketing.
Together, we discussed innovative solutions such as an AI-based process for creating Sponsored Brand Headline Ads that convert, an N-Gram Analyzer for discovering new keywords from "1 click search terms," a Peak-Season Checklist to ensure a well-prepared campaign launch, and a Search Query Analyzer to identify the most promising keywords for ranking.
Despite Amazon's significant investment in developing its ad system, many businesses continue to rely on outdated strategies from as far back as 2018. They often overlook the fact that advertising success depends on more than just financial muscle but rather nuance and finely-tuned tactics.
In the latest live session from Orange Klik, hosted by Augustas Kligys, three Amazon experts - me, Yoni Mazor of GETIDA, and Timo Bock of Dragonflip - were invited to share nine outdated Amazon FBA selling strategies that should be abandoned in favor of new, more effective tactics in 2023.
The episode covers a wide range of topics, and dives into various Amazon policies regarding PPC and 3D rendering.
In this recent PPC Den episode, Mike invited me on to discuss our New Year's PPC resolutions and emphasize the significance of being a lifelong learner in the world of Amazon Advertising. We highlighted relevant topics such as the importance of regularly assessing one's competencies, identifying areas for improvement, keyword strategies, and had discussions on market share, day parting, and budget allocation among others.
Amazon has emerged as a major player in digital advertising, thanks to its continued investment in online marketing platforms like it's DSP (Demand Side Platform). This platform offers advertisers way more targeting options (such as third-party audiences), helping them optimize their ad expenditure mostly for mid and upper-funnel purposes.
This blog post covers third-party Amazon DSP audiences and how they can be utilized to enhance your advertising campaigns. It will also explore the process of creating and using these audiences, as well as recommend best practices for integrating them into your overall advertising strategy.
Events 📅
Seller Sessions Live is back. It will be held at the America Square Conference Centre in London which is a larger and more centrally located venue compared to previous years. This conference is one of my favorites and I’ve attended every year so far since the first iteration. I’ve already purchased my ticket for this year 🎟️.
The speakers are top-notch, there is a great mix of service providers and ecom business owners which keeps it interesting for both groups, and you can’t beat the night out in London after the event wraps. Danny (the organizer) is trying something new this year with an Amazon Seller Hack Competition with a £1,000 prize.
Don't miss out on this great chance to take a trip to London for networking, learning, and fun all at the same time. Especially if you're coming from North America. No better excuse for a stay in London. This always sells out so you may want to act fast!
Amazon News 📰
Amazon has suddenly decided to begin sourcing products directly from brand owners in the EU, leaving distributors in a bit of a bind. Vendors sell to Amazon directly at wholesale prices, and Amazon resells the items controlling retail prices. This change means that any distributors or resellers are cut out of equation. This is part of Amazon's efforts in 2023 to focus on profit by controlling costs and keep prices low for customers. The way Amazon sees it, these distributors are middlemen who are hurting their margin.
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If you're a vendor in Europe, you may have received a letter from Amazon stating that they will stop sourcing all products from you starting on January 15th 2024 or a date even sooner. This doesn't preclude these companies from selling the same products with a 3P account, but that relationship looks quite different from operating as a Vendor. While we don’t have any 1P clients impacted by this, we feel your pain.
At the start of this month Amazon made significant changes to their storage limit policy. They replaced the ASIN limit with a single storage volume limit, which is calculated per month instead of per week. The most significant change is that sellers can bid on more storage space. To do so, you must list the amount of space you need and how much you're willing to pay per cubic foot. Amazon offers performance credits to reward good behavior, which can offset the cost of your bidding on that allocated space.
See the breakdown of exactly how Amazon's storage limits work and, most importantly, how to get around them in this guide from Ecom Crew.
This piece dives into how Flipkart managed to trump Amazon in the 2016 Big Billion Days Sale — by prioritizing smartphones. Even though Flipkart has achieved amazing things, it still struggles to turn a profit and faces fierce competition from all sides. While some analysts think Walmart paid too much for Flipkart, others believe that Amazon lost an opportunity to crush Flipkart way back in 2016. Either way, this homegrown Indian player is the only serious challenger to Amazon in India which will continue to grow at a breakneck pace over the next few decades. This along with regulation challenges means Amazon is facing some stiff competition.
The Top 3 Twitter Threads This Month 📱
Twitter (when it's working properly) continues to be one of my favorite sources of real-time news updates and thought-provoking discussions from like-minded individuals in the Amazon space.
Here are 3️ that got my attention:
Aaron took to Twitter to talk about how Amazon violates its own product listing variation rules for their own products. Despite this violation, Amazon did not impose any penalties, and in one instance, the product even received a Best Seller badge 😅
Bryan shared details about his visit to an Amazon Fulfillment Center where he observed a demonstration of Amazon's inventory robots. The constantly moving shelves, robots, and cameras used to track and automate inventory counts impressed him, and he feels that this technology provides Amazon with an advantage over its rivals. Much like AWS it could allow them to license it elsewhere as a revenue center.
Michael blasted out his wishlist of changes that he would like to see from Amazon to level the playing field for third-party (3P) sellers. He suggested that Amazon should give 3P sellers the same benefits and opportunities for success as Amazon and Amazon 1P products.
Just like Aaron, he outlined several issues that Amazon's own brands are allowed to do but 3P sellers aren't. I can't say I disagree with anything here!
Nerd Zone 🤓
Rule-base bidding comes to Amazon Advertising
Something we've seen in Google Ads and other PPC platforms for years is built-in automated bidding. It goes by many names, Google's "Performance Max" is maybe the most notable form thats popular these days, but the core idea is the same: give us your goals and we'll worry about the bidding for you.
Bidding is one of the pillars of PPC optimization and something that's pretty hard to nail down unless you have considerable experience, so this is a very tempting proposition for the millions of users who want to save time and lack experience. A large part of the value proposition of all major Amazon PPC tools is an intelligent bidding algorithm.
Well, earlier this year Amazon entered the fray with their own Rule-based bidding option. Found at the campaign level, this setting allows you to enter a target ROAS and Amazon with all the might of their data behind them will make changes to the bidding for you. There are some basic requirements like 30 days of spend and basic budget requirements, but it works for many types of campaigns. If within 21 days Amazon is unable to meet your performance target they will revert the settings. We've also noticed that the bid changes they make are not logged in the campaign history area. 🤔
We are cautiously, carefully, testing this in a variety of accounts and will report back with what we find (or you may hear from us directly as a client).
Thanks for reading!
- Brent
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1yThanks for sharing