#696 – Tips For Smarter Amazon Advertising

Vince Montero, former senior product marketing manager at Helium 10 and now CEO and Founder of Evinced Digital, joins us to uncover the transformative updates in Amazon advertising that are revolutionizing campaign management for sellers. Vince breaks down the latest innovations, including the game-changing keyword harvesting update in Helium 10 Ads, which clears the path for more efficient and focused advertising by eliminating redundant keyword suggestions. With Vince’s expert insights, you’ll learn how to leverage the new automation toggle to streamline your campaign efforts and maximize the potential of Amazon Marketing Cloud for smarter audience targeting, as well as benefit from new-to-brand bid adjustments.

Explore the future of Amazon advertising with advanced AI-powered creative tools that are setting new standards for campaign strategies. From the AI video generator that crafts engaging, dynamic content in no time to the AI audience query generator that refines targeting precision, these tools are reshaping the way sellers approach advertising. Alongside these creative advancements, we discuss Amazon’s strategic pivot to long-term metrics and forecasted ROAS, offering a fresh perspective on the enduring impact of ads beyond immediate sales. This episode promises a ton of actionable strategies and forward-thinking insights, essential for anyone eager to outpace the competition in the evolving Amazon PPC landscape.

In episode 696 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Vince discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon Advertising Updates for Sellers
• 02:14 – Automating Keyword Harvesting for Campaigns
• 06:52 – Amazon Ads Brand Bid Adjustments
• 10:14 – Amazon Ads Audience Capabilities Update
• 13:41 – Amazon Advertising Strategies and Audience Targeting
• 14:55 – Testing Bid Adjustments for Successful Campaigns
• 18:01 – Introduction to Audience Management Console
• 20:25 – Advanced Creative Tools and Long-Term Metrics
• 23:59 – Amazon Video Ads with AI

Transcript

Shivali Patel:

Today, we are breaking down the newest Amazon advertising updates that you need to know to stay competitive. From a long-awaited keyword harvesting update inside of Helium 10 ads, smarter audience targeting with AMC and new-to-brand bid adjustments, all the way to Amazon’s new AI audience query generator and AI video generator. The features covered in this episode are the same ones that are already reshaping how sellers can run campaigns.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Seller’s podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed. Organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Shivali Patel:

And to walk you through all of that, our special guest for this episode is none other than Mr. Vince Montero, a former senior product marketing manager and evangelist at Helium 10, as well as the founder and CEO of Evinced Digital. You’ll want to sit all the way to the end of the episode, because he really does cover updates that quickly help you zero in on shoppers with real buying intent. Learn how to build polished short form product ads in seconds, everything from lifestyle shots and animations to branded overlays and background music in just a few clicks. Take it away, Vince.

Vince:

I’m excited about things I’ve seen both within Ads and on Seller Central. Recently, there’s been a lot of movement the past couple of months, but I know that I was excited to see something that Bradley had posted in the Weekly Buzz. I believe, which was something that I had been asking about for well, basically since we launched Adtomic or launched Ads, and I know that it’s something that he would want me to share here as well.

Vince:

But, yeah, let’s get into this TACOS Tuesday, but get into this new update in Ads first. So you’re probably familiar with Ads Helium 10 Ads if you are here on this TACOS Tuesday, which is all about PPC. So this is the solution from Helium 10 that I helped create the first iterations of back in 2019-2020. And one thing that we always had an issue with keyword harvesting, which is, as many of you probably already know, is looking for search terms that have done well for you that you want to then target on their own, so on a keyword basis, in its own campaign, or maybe a campaign with multiple keywords. So the keyword harvesting rules that we have and you can see a lot of this particular one, I just picked this account quite a different few harvesting rules. Basically, you wanna set that up by product type, primarily to get the most relevant search terms to turn into keywords. But the issue is that it’s kind of like this spout that once you turn on, it’s kind of hard to control. Now, the whole point of testing these keywords is, or finding these search terms is to test them as keywords. But you can’t really do that if you’ve got them all in a campaign with a bunch of different other keywords, and especially if they’re all different search volumes. You know, when I would do trainings at Helium 10, I would always say you know maximum five keywords if it’s high search volume and maybe maximum 20 keywords in a campaign if it’s a lower search volume. Well, we haven’t really had a good way to moderate that. That’s all been a manual process, and that’s something that Bradley talked about, so I just kind of wanted to pop in here and show you something that was done recently to help with that, so I’m just going to pick one of these roles. As you can see, you can automate keyword harvesting rules. I don’t have any of them on to automation, because I actually like to see the keywords that Ads is pulling before I add them into a different campaign, the keywords that ads is pulling before I add them into a different campaign. Now, the other layer to that, though, is well, is that keyword already in another campaign in that same grouping? So I’ll just open one of these for you guys to give you an idea.

Vince:

So this is a rule for one of my client’s products. It’s a bike rack. It’s the classic rack, so, basically, every single campaign that I have that has that product in. It is in this rule and what Ads will do is look for search terms on all these different ad groups in these campaigns, whether it be a product targeting. So ASIN based or keyword based. You got your auto campaigns here. Those are ASINs and search terms and if it’s good, it will then transfer over to the other similar campaigns, other campaigns that are check marked here, so that you can test it in different campaign formats and different match types, which is really important. But again, that’s kind of like turning on a hose. So unless you’re moderating that and watching it carefully, it can quickly go from five keywords in a campaign to 25, 30, 40, and then you’re over best practices.

Vince:

So what they added here at the very, very bottom is in this control area. Previously, control was hey, do you want to manually do this or you want to automate this? Now they’ve added this new toggle, which I’m going to go ahead and keep this on.

Vince:

This is something that I’m slowly going through and adding to all my rules is basically don’t suggest that search term if it already exists in that same match type at least.

Vince:

So if it’s already as an exact somewhere, don’t add it as an exact in a new campaign. So if it’s in the same, if it’s in the rule and you’ve already got a campaign that has that keyword in that match type, it’s not even going to bring it up. It’s not even going to bring it up, it’s not even going to suggest it. So that takes up a lot of the kind of like manual back and forth of checking the keywords that are being pulled from Ads so for your keyword harvesting rules. So this is going to save up a lot of time and hopefully it’s going to stop that whole overflow of just adding way too many keywords that into a campaign when they already might exist in other campaigns in the exact same match type. Really cool feature, excited about that. And again something that I had been asking for a while. With that I’m going to go ahead and then go into my slides, which I presented, which are going to be more off Amazon.

Vince:

So what we’re going to talk about today against new amazon ads features that sellers like you guys can actually implement, pretty much right away, today, if you wanted to. So the first thing that I wanted to talk about, which I’m really excited about, actually, is Amazon’s introduction of new brand bid adjustments for sponsor brand campaigns specifically now. This lets you raise your bid specifically for shoppers who haven’t purchased from your brand up to 12 months. Now, this is a big deal because it shifts the focus from just driving sales to actually growing your customer base. If you’re a new brand, that’s really important for that exposure and getting that brand new customer base.

Vince:

One of my clients that I’ve set this up for, who we did increase well, we started at 30, went up 50, 100%, and once we hit the 100% new to brand bid boost, we saw their new customer orders nearly double. Not to say that that’s going to happen for everyone, but there is the potential there. So what this graph shows just representations. I like to give some visuals and this is just the order distribution before applying the new to bad, new to brand bid adjustments. The green stacked bars represent the incremental growth after the bid boost were actually applied and you just want to notice how the new to brand segment grows significantly when using, you know, a 50 increase up to 100 bid increase. You could even go higher than that.

Vince:

I typically like to stay at the 100 bid increase just to make sure it doesn’t actually go out of control now. So why does this matter for you guys as sellers? This will help you expand your customer acquisition. You’re not just retargeting existing buyers. You’re funding growth by reaching brand new customers, which is for a lot of clients that I have that don’t sell consumables and reorders. It’s really, really important that they get brand new customers all the time, and this is a data-driven strategy. A lot of times, with these Amazon updates, you can’t really track some of the measurements that they’ve added. This one in particular, they actually did add it, so you can track new to brand metrics in Amazon ads reports to directly measure these incremental sales.

Vince:

Now, how to implement this? Now you’re going to want to create a brand new sponsor product, a brand campaign. This isn’t something that you can go into an existing campaign yet to add. Sometimes Amazon does add that after the fact. Right now it’s just creating a sponsor brand campaign. Enable new to brand bid adjustment.

Vince:

And again start with a conservative boost, maybe 30 to 50, and then scale up based on you know performance or your ROI. Important you’re going to want to monitor your new to brand orders and need a brand percentage of sales in the campaign reporting that I mentioned. Now, again, this one has provided the best ROI so far in my testing. That’s why I did want to start with this particular new to brand audience. But there are other ones. So Amazon Marketing Cloud, which is AMC, they are also now available in sponsored brands. This means that you can adjust with for specific audiences, not just new to brand, like I just went over. But as you can see in the screenshot, you’ve got cart abandoners, people who basically just added your product to the cart and just maybe win a mate. Maybe they forgot about it, maybe they’re waiting for a sale and, importantly, past purchases people who have actually bought your products in the past. So this kind of targeting lets you bid higher only on the shoppers that are most likely to convert, and this change signals that Amazon’s really moving towards more audience-driven targeting. We’re seeing more and more audience capabilities within the Amazon Ads console. So it’s definitely something that you’re going to want to test, but you’re going to want to test these audiences in separate campaigns to get the best data. So that’s what I did, basically, I did add to cart for one and I did pass purchases for another, and then I need a brand. I need a brand for me and for my experiments. So far, need a brand really did perform the best. So definitely wanted to put that out there for you guys.

Vince:

Now, important thing to note with SB campaigns in general, if you guys haven’t seen within your console, current sponsor brands are what’s called version three and they don’t have these capabilities, these audience capabilities that we just went over, and all those campaigns are going to be deactivated by the end of October. Amazon does that sometimes with campaign types. They’ll come out with new iterations and then the older ones basically fall off. So it’s happening again with all sponsored brand campaigns. So if you haven’t refreshed your sponsored brand campaigns yet, now’s a really good time to do that launch or take your existing ones and move them into version three so that you can take advantage of the new bit adjustment bit adjustment capabilities I just went over.

Vince:

Amazon does make it fairly easy to update your campaigns. You can find them in the recommendations section. That’s where this screenshot is. If you guys don’t know where that is, typically it’s in the upper left hand column, right when you log into the Ads console. And it’ll be one of the things that they’re recommending, because I’m seeing it more and more, as in this example from one of my clients, there’s nine campaigns that with the click of a button, actually, I can take all these version 3 SB campaigns and turn them into version 4 campaigns. Now it does kind of start over from scratch because you’re archiving the older campaigns. So keep that in mind, that you’re going to want to monitor those to get them back up to maybe their previous performance.

Vince:

All right, next up is something that I’m finding interesting again for some of my clients is business only campaigns or business focused campaigns. So this is another recent update again where you can really just target campaigns just to businesses and just to that area within sponsored products. Now, of course, if your products work well for professional buyers or maybe bulk orders, this really kind of is a no brainer to test, because Amazon business buyers are often repeat purchasers. They’re typically a little bit less price sensitive than your average consumer and in many cases they can be tax exempt. In this visual again just a quick graphic just to show the side by side representation that these are two separate buyer groups. You’ve got your consumer buyers, which are just general shoppers and typically have mixed intent because they’re buying lots of different types of products, versus business buyers, who are bulk orders, higher value growth, and so the arrows indicate just that separation of campaign targeting with a focus on business only campaigns versus the bulk orders and B2B growth. So, in general, what is it? It’s just another campaign type within sponsored products for Amazon. It just excludes regular shoppers. So, again, this is a feature that will help you focus on these high intent professionals. But keep in mind, it will only work for businesses. So this is a very niche campaign type. So, again, how to implement that. In the ads console when you’re creating a new sponsored product campaign, you can see you’ve got two options.

Vince:

Now you’ve got the Amazon and beyond which is in Amazon, as well as obviously some off Amazon marketing, or you can just select the business only campaign option. I’ve seen this version of the business only selection a couple of different ways. It’s either in the ad group or maybe even on the very, very first creative or create campaign page that you see. That breaks down all the different campaigns. You’ll see this business only option now. Now, very important because this is a very specific type of campaign, you do want to tailor your ad copy in the creative towards business use cases like bulk orders, maybe operational efficiency, cost savings of buying in bulk versus not, and, again, always important to track your campaign performance separately from your consumer campaign. So if you’ve got those running side by side, keep in mind it’s not apples to apples, it’s really apples to oranges. So you’re going to want to measure that incremental growth separately. Now, best case scenario and I have seen that for a couple of my clients you will see stronger ROI for, again, for products designed for business, industrial or maybe kind of bulk purchasing and in some cases, improved ad efficiency with fewer wasted impressions on maybe some of those retail shoppers that are mixed intent.

Vince:

Now, if you’re not quite sure if your product might work, maybe you’re on the fence about this. I did try this with another client and it actually didn’t work for them, but it might work. You can also it’s kind of a pro tip too you can test your product ahead of time. You can add bid adjustments in existing SB campaigns. You want to just go into the campaign, into the ad group in the left side menu. Under bid adjustments, you’ll now see all placements. Amazon business placements and audiences. So under that Amazon business placements, you can go ahead and increase the bid adjustments. Again, I would do incrementally 30, maybe 50, then a hundred and if you do actually see good results here, it could indicate that your product might be good for a business only campaign. So you could test this either an existing campaign that’s doing well or maybe a campaign that’s not doing well see if it might improve the results Now. So again, this is just something that you want. If you wanted to test, you can go ahead and do that If you wanna just add this as a layer to some of your campaigns without creating a whole separate business only campaign. You can also do that as well, but, as always, test, test, test. Now again, SB campaigns also have audiences that we just went over with SB, but the audience capabilities for SB are a little bit older, so that’s why we’re not gonna go over those audiences again in more detail today.

Vince:

Next up is specific to AMC, but I do feel it’s important. A lot more sellers are getting access to AMC, which I think is important. Again stands for Amazon Marketing Cloud, or you have software that actually will get you access, like Adtomic has an AMC layer as well. So this is a brand new way to create audiences and it’s based on it uses AI to do that kind of data dive into the, into audiences for you. So it really reduces the need for extensive knowledge of AMC, which can be a little bit complicated, and you can just type in in plain English prompts like I don’t know customers who buying camping gear, parents who are shopping for their babies, newborns. The tool then recommends ready to use audiences based on Amazon’s first party data. So this is really just a shortcut for discovering niches that you might not have thought of before. It’s pretty quick and it’s easy. So if you’ve got maybe seasonal products or product specific campaigns where you’ve got a limited time. This again also might be easy to then turn off.

Vince:

Again, the graph here is just kind of a little before and after visual showing how layering the audiences changes the targeting efficiency. So on the left you see a typical funnel without the AI advanced audience targeting, so you’ve got the higher impressions, but then a steep drop-off as shoppers move down to purchase. And on the right is the same funnel after implementing the AI-generated audience segments. So just stronger engagement, fewer drop-offs and significantly more conversions, because you’re really targeting the exact type of audience that you want your campaigns to be put in front of. So why does all this matter? Well, again, it removes the need for deep technical knowledge in AMC.

Vince:

I’ve been doing this for a while, since 2017. And for me it was even a learning curve on how to implement AMC and create those audiences and you can quickly uncover maybe some niche audiences that you might not have thought of before. So how to implement this? Again, inside AMC you can open up sponsor brands or sponsor display campaigns and under the creation section, you go to the audiences and then custom and then AI audience query generator and again type those prompts, whatever it is that you’re looking for shoppers buying rechargeable lanterns, maybe traveling gear for their new baby, who knows and see what it comes up with. Review those suggestions, review the suggested segments and then add to your relevant campaigns and then target them.

Vince:

Again, I want to stress this again, as with all things that I typically teach and basically for all the audience features that I’ve talked about in today’s session, you’re going to want to test, test multiple audiences, don’t just one and done. I’ve seen some clients come to me saying, oh, we tried that and we tried that, but then we stopped because it didn’t work. You wanna iterate, right? You wanna create separate ad groups for each audience to measure performance independently, but multiple different types of audiences, and you can combine with new to brand adjustments adjustments like I just went over earlier in the session. If you layer the new to brand boost on audiences, it’ll expand your customer base. Again, review every 30 days minimum. It’s not the same as maybe your standard CPC or PPC campaigns where you can kind of maybe get an idea after the first week or two. I would say 30 days is probably the minimum required time to really see if an AMC audience layer is gonna work for you and then just rotate the underperforming audiences out and refresh with new segments, based on, maybe, seasonal trends, and use video ads when you can. I’ve seen higher engagement rates with these audiences, especially when the creative is tailored to their particular needs. So video is always has been and becoming more and more important in the efficiency of your ad spend because we are seeing definitely higher engagement when it comes to video.

Vince:

So, on that note, I wanted to cover some new advanced creative tools that are primarily powered by AI, and this is key. In general, creative, in my opinion, is just as important as targeting, if not more, because if it’s the main visual that they see first, the shopper is going to engage with that more importantly than the keyword that you might have put in there for them to see it. So Amazon’s continuing to step up their game when it comes to AI and comes to video, and this is just another example of that. This is an AI video generator and it lets you create really kind of polished up to 20 second videos automatically. It’ll include background music, text overlays, even product and use animations, and this used to require a lot of editing or, you know, outsourcing to maybe other AI tools or maybe other companies, but now you can use this to really quickly create videos for you in Amazon itself.

Vince:

Now the standard video builder is still there, so there’s basically two video builders now in the console and I’ll show you that in a second and that’s the one that just can turn your product images into short videos using templates. So you basically just select images and you can put it into a template. That’ll add maybe some graphic texts and some video, but it’s a little bit more manual and it doesn’t do some of the animations that the new AI video generator does. But either way, either direction you do choose, Amazon really has confirmed that video ads consistently deliver higher engagement, um, compared to static images, so this is really a tool that every seller should be testing. So where do you find both of these? Actually, you just navigate to the menu in your Ads console and select creative tools and then you scroll down to the video builder. Now, once you do that, this will open up the same page that the original builder is at, but if you click on the generate video button in the header for right now it’s only in the header, for some reason it’ll take you to the new area where you’re going to just select a product and run it. So the regular this, the original video builder is in the button below that which is just create video, so it’s a little bit confusing. So that’s why I highlighted this with the red box you can see how to get into the new AI version.

Vince:

Now after you select a product. I went ahead and selected a product in this example already just again, one of my clients, bike Racks. It’ll look at pretty much all the images, the video and videos on the detail page, the A-plus content, and I even think it might even be looking at some of the ads for the product, based on what I saw, and it’ll provide an initial six options for you, maximum 21 seconds long, and these are polished video ads. If we had more time I was gonna actually pop over there into that and so you can actually see these and see how some of them moved, but I know we’re pressed for time, so, but you do wanna keep an eye out for hallucinations, like you can see in the first video. Or yeah, well, video image you’ve got the guy kind of like going through a door, but his top bike wheel is missing, so that wheel is still on the wall.

Vince:

So, the AI separated that from the wall, from the bike, and so he’s walking away without a tire on it. So there was a couple of funny hallucinations that it did, but then there were three that actually were pretty good, and it combined existing videos and ads and it sped up some of the video in some cases, so it can do some really interesting things. If your product is maybe not as difficult to explain or to demonstrate, it might be really super helpful. If it needs a lot more detail or explanation for how to use your product, this might not be the best fit still yet, but it’s probably moving in that direction. So again, why does all this matter? Video ads pretty much perform static Ads and stuff in sponsored brands and in dsp placements. Um so you can test professional quality, creative, without hiring editors, without going to, you know, different software. It’ll speed up your video production. Maybe if you’ve got seasonal or product launches that you just need something really, really quickly. So it’ll help smaller brands as well as larger brands, and or it can provide baseline video content. You can iterate that on, you know, later on with a professional builder or production, a production team, if you want to do that later.

Vince:

Last but not least, something else that I think is interesting is performance metrics and forecasting that Amazon’s now integrating into the Ads console, so they’re changing how we measure success. Many sellers only rely on short-term ACoS or ROAS as their performance metrics, but the problem is that is typically reactive and looking at past data and it’s only showing a part of the picture. So now we have LTS, which is Long-Term Sales metrics, and forecasted ROAS. These track the influence of ads over a 12-month period and it captures delayed conversions, repeat purchasers, that sometimes get overlooked when looking at ACoS and ROAS metrics alone. So here’s what that looks like in practice. Again, just a visual. The red line shows short-term attribution, where sales spike quickly but, you know, fade pretty fast. The green line shows, you know, longer term sales, a slower up front but continuing steadily for months after that. Now this really kind of shows a bigger, extended impact of your Ads, which is why I like it. When you do start using these LTS metrics, it, it changes the conversation at least it has with you know, conversations with my clients is, you know Ads don’t look just like a cost center anymore. They are a cost of doing business. That is known. But there you know, we can really demonstrate how they become long term growth drivers, right? So, which is important when you’re trying to explain what maybe the strategy is and projections, maybe forecasting for the year.

Vince:

So how to implement in the Amazon Ads console, you guys should be pretty familiar with all the different columns. You hit that columns button and then you can see the LTS metrics. LTS ROAS is there as well. I didn’t put that screenshot in here cause you guys know how to find things, but I do want to show you the kind of the results of what that looks like. Now, currently, these metrics are only available for sponsor brand and sponsor display, but that could be changing. That could be coming for a sponsored product as well.

Vince:

As we know, Amazon likes to add things and then increase its reach over time. So once you do enable those metrics, you can really compare, you know, against your standard ACOS and ROAS to identify campaigns, maybe some long term payback, and then you can use those insights to adjust, maybe bids, budgets or strategy, maybe with that campaign and focus on customer acquisition over short term profitability. Now, when looking at this small sampling of campaigns, I recognize that the top two campaigns had a higher ROAS over time than maybe some of the ones below. So having that insight makes you look at campaigns a little bit differently and what the forecasting might be for those. You maybe change your strategy a little bit for these campaigns.

Vince:

If you didn’t have this data, this additional layer, you might do a different strategy with those campaigns. So again, the more data, the more information that you have in your pocket, the more you can make accurate decisions for all your PPC campaigns and strategies. And that’s kind of it. That was my five major updates that you can well six, because I also talked about the update in Ads that just happened a week and a half ago, but you can implement these today for ACOS smarter targeting new audiences. You’ve got the AI driven discovery, better creative tools and now some maybe long-term measurements. So the common theme among these things that I’m sharing with you guys is that Amazon’s definitely moving more audience driven and AI assisted advertising that look beyond just the short term. So make sure you guys are taking a look at all these things that are available to you within the Ads console.

Shivali Patel:

Amazing. And there you have it, guys. That is a wrap on today’s deep dive into all the latest and greatest Amazon ads updates. Go check this out for yourself and we’ll catch you in the next episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast.

---

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.