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Sean Smith and Brian Johnson come in for a ppc roundtable discussion.
Metrics
- A lot of Sellers (new and established) ask do my numbers look right compared to everyone else
- Am I in the range of expected numbers on my metrics
- 1st things to look for are click-through and conversion rates
- Clickthrough rate = How good are the ads getting the shopper from search to my listing (Normal is 0.3% to 1% and above would be great <0.2% is a potential relevance or pricing mismatch )
- Conversion = getting them from click through to purchase
Check yourself
- Take the target search term and look at page one results
- Compare how would my title, price, image and reviews fit in – if you stick out like a sore thumb then you’re going to stick out for buyers too (you don’t belong on that page)
- You need to get out and have your product in people’s hands and speak to them so your get the human intelligence along with the data intelligence too
- Sean looks at the business report as well to see how they are doing over all
- Report on the last 30 days and the number of sessions and unit/session % to see which ones are worth advertising or not
- Hard to manage a product that does poorly organically or on conversion rates
Categories and choice
- In baby category are there a lot of window shoppers than buyers
- lower conversion rate is because the buying process has slowed down
- Process slows down as there is too much choice
- Some categories have more of this (size, colour, boys, patterned, etc)
- Forces the potential buyer to become a window shopper but not on the first visits (hits conversions)
- Decision fatigue is what it’s called when people struggle to decide between choice
- Steve jobs would wear the same black top each day
- The more decisions you make in a day the more fatigued you become as a buyer
Follow the crowd
- Do I follow my competitor and have variations or
- Do I go to a completely different product and avoid the fatigue
- Sean tries not to work with products with multiple variations
- Sean prefers to work with high velocity products
- Unit session % are usually lower and so not right for Sean
Investment in Advertising
- If you give us a product with a $10 price tag and a 5% conversion rate then it makes it harder to get to a good breakeven cost when finding out who the target audience is
- Your advertising won’t show as good a return on this kind of product as opposed to a high velocity product with a higher price tag and higher conversion rate
- As an Agency you need to be able to show a return to the client and it’s easier with higher velocity SKUs
- Easier to work with and a more predictable return
- If you can’t provide an outcome that is equal to or higher than the fee then it’s not going to fly
Goal Setting
- If you’ve been banging your head against the wall for 60 days you need to look at your goals
- Being good and realistic at goal setting
- What realistically can you do?
- You can keep testing but you have ti have a destination in mind
- Look at what’s happened in the last two months
Seasonality
- Panic without looking at what’s going on seasonally
- All the main keywords are ranking fine, position is still 1-3 but sales are down and ACoS is going in the wrong direction (as is everyone else)
- We set new goals for the Summer to work at a new ACoS, or let the market tell us what’s going on
- Leave everything as is pre-summer and then watch, when things correct we follow suit and correct along with it
- Sometimes you can confuse seasonality for some of Amazon’s decisions they make on PPC
Slump in Sales
- Brian put a chart together regarding Google Trends on ecommerce platforms to show the holiday predictable season within the USA (2 yrs old now)
- Events that happen in holiday seasons:
- Distracting the Shopper from buying – Holidays, kids on break at Home distracting them
- Amazon knows of these distractions and flexes their ads and marketing for when they can get their biggest bang for their buck
- They put Prime Day in July to counter the slump during the worst month of the year
- Amazon ad network for ad retargeting meant they pulled away from Google ad retargeting and overall sales dropped
