PPC Roundtable (pt2) with Brian Johnson & Sean Smith

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Sean Smith and Brian Johnson come in for part 2 of the ppc roundtable discussion.

Use Best seller rank to review your product position compared to others
Are sales dropping but BSR is holding the same?
Is my organic keyword ranking holding the same?
If so then it’s like a trend / seasonal issue and affecting all
And you notice that great seller that you admire and compete with is increasing his BSR and sales bucking the trend
Well they are probably using off-Amazon traffic such as email lists, pinterest, instagram, youtube influencers
Pulling in outside traffic to supplement the lower Amazon traffic

New Ad Placements – External Ad Network

The external ad network for retargeting and external ads driven by Amazon
You could opt in through an automatic campaign
Brian had ads back in October in the external ad network – these are still running and never turned off
Like a gold-panning campaign – bringing in some extra cash but not a magic bullet
Amazon recently reintroduced that and it’s still in Beta through sponsored ads automatic campaigns
If you are doing it and your competitors are not then you have a slight edge
Think they use AAP inventory for advertising
The reporting on this is not great (like AMS reporting)
Turns all your auto campaigns – see performance in the placement report but gives no insight into what website it was advertised on
AAP inventory advertising usually shows which website you got traffic from
Amazon should include in the search term report keyword performance on external ads

Used to be just the top banner along the search results
Nov/Dec Amazon introduced 4 new placements (skyscraper ad, three rectangle ads below search results and a couple more on best seller list and other product categories
Not the same as product display ads available through AMS
These new placements only apply to new ads not your existing ones

Unit session % is always higher than your PPC conversion – two to three times
Optimising on these platforms – treat those separately
Unit Session Business reports – Brian has always been critical
ASIN reports showing the sales and order metrics overall and doesn’t separate out
A session is a visit to your product listing page (an ad click would produce a session)
How come the numbers don’t add up – when we fired ads why did the sessions stay the same?
Been raging asa debate for 2-3 years
Supposed to include organic and ad driven traffic but wasn’t consistent when ads were turned on and then off
A lot of people rely on unit session %

What do you look for in terms of growth in an account to see if there’s opportunity to grow
Expectations – you must define growth with that person
You don’t add any more SKUs as a constraint
What levers could you use to grow the account
If time is not a key driver
Look at unique search terms – what are we not bidding on that we could be
This would be unique traffic and higher probability and segment out on the number of conversions
This tells us if we can grow the account
Established accounts have search term data that can be used and researched to forecast
Tricky as to whether you’re going to see the opportunities on the organic side as well

How well have they done their optimisation?
Key metrics?
What kind of conversion rates are they working with?
How are they placed organically for a variety of keywords?
How ads have hit their target market (100-200 keywords per product)?
Expecting 75-100 of those keywords will get ad clicks
Probably 30-50 keywords get conversions
Some teach you should have only 50 keywords in a campaign – this is not true!
What are 20% of the products that are producing 80% of the Sales – could be a red flag
Which products have high conversion rates but not hit their sales potential
You could move the needle on 20% of the products and meet the client’s expectations
Ideal candidates for showing growth:
- Someone who will launch more SKUs
- They have never pulled search terms reports on their account
You can do a lot with the ‘Product Performance’ report on variations and sales
Use 7 day advertised SKU units when looking at sear-term reports

Keyword audit – find out if you’re bidding on the right keywords for the product
It’s a really manual process
There’s no historical data to show the success you will get bidding on a particular keyword

Use Google Trends to spot the days to advertise for the holidays
Pre-upload campaigns with start and end dates in them
“Gifts for Father Day’ keywords – bid low on these as they are generic terms and will be low converting