Roundtable Part 2:Kevin King, Sean Smith and Liran Hirschkorn

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Roundtable part 2 with Liran, Kevin and Sean

New PPC Launches in Q4

Sean will be launching something new – he has aggressive clients
Kevin does not recommend launching into November and beyond
Depending on the category you’re in, you can go 3x to 10x and that’s reflected in your clicks and ad spend and eduction in the amount of clicks to conversion
Different to a quiet time in Summer when demand is quite low says our roundtable experts
And it takes longer to rank using PPC on keywords than it does with giveaways

Take advantage of variations on your listing – especially Q4
Launch some seasonal products and just use PPC instead of a launch
Seasonal products don’t have much competition
Kevin is going for a big seasonal project next year
Go for a product that you can sell outside of the seasons too though
A valentines card you will sell seasonally for 3 weeks of the year and nothing outside that
A Teddy bear packaged for Valentines can be sold seasonally to get sales, the same bear can be sold all year round without the Valentine’s slant and continue to make sales reducing your risk
Use CamelCamelCamel and Keeper to check when products are picking
You can see when your competitors went from 5 per day to 10, 15 per day to plan your ordering and shipping and ride the wave
Consider doing variations
Encourage coupons to buy multiples

Sean has been conservative for the bids as everyone else is very aggressive
He uses 25% maybe upto 50% for some
Be sure of the target you want to spend through that day
Set good foundations and metrics
Christmas – bidding for keywords doesn’t seem to work well
Mothers and Fathers day seems to work better on keywords
Sean doesn’t do much ‘appending’ for seasonal sales
There’s not so much search volume on ‘cyber Monday’ or ‘black Friday’ – not like Mothers day and Fathers day
Appending products (i.e. Cyber Monday [your product]) to these terms is not great for search volume

Relationship campaigns “gifts for [him | her | uncle, etc]” are a good route says the roundtable
Type of keywords dictates the match type used for the search term
Better converting search terms get three match types for them
Lower converting get phrase and board with lower bids
Average CPC by match type by SKU is the starting point to work out multiples
If its super general then we run it at phrase and broad and lower bids to test and see what works
Kevin focuses on profitability rather than ACoS
PPC should be around 20% of sales
If a product is costing $15 to make a sale and sold 5 products and one was PPC then that’s fine
Just spread the $3 cost across all of the 5 sales to reflect the PPC cost
A higher ACoS can lead to more profitability – it can be misleading

Kevin will do them non-seasonal but find them hit or miss
Too cluttered and crowded unless on a holiday
Amazon daily deals – Kevin done one recently and they are only invitation to get into
Best Deals is different to deal of the day – it’s for 2 weeks and you have to discount upto 15%
Might get increased conversions on your listing as a result
It’s not keyword driven but you can get a Halo effect from the traffic
Liran has had good results from Best Deals

Getting reviews in Europe
Get Amazon to transfer the listings from US to EU – but when you get your first reviews in the new country the previous reviews disappear
Same strategies used in EU as in US
Good quality product, good inserts, facebook ads to the audience, what you do today will transfer
Only 1-2% of customers leave reviews
Generate a lot of sales and you will get reviews