#242 – PPC Talk – An In-Depth Look at a Powerful New Amazon Advertising Platform

E-commerce is a rapidly evolving ecosystem, and there might not be another aspect of it that has changed as much as the importance of Amazon advertising. Pay per Click (PPC) advertising on Amazon used to be “one” of the ways that sellers made prospective buyers aware of their products. Increasingly, it has become the life blood of an Amazon product launch.

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist, Bradley Sutton presents another PPC Talk episode featuring two of the people behind Helium 10’s new Adtomic PPC tool. With him today are Vince Montero, Helium 10’s Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Ad Platforms, and Kevin Shewey, Adtomic’s Account Management Team Lead.

These two Amazon advertising pros are here to offer the latest PPC strategies as well as give a deep dive on the new Adtomic advertising platform. Helium 10’s ADS was great, and Adtomic is even better. Listen in to find out how Helium 10’s Adtomic can play a very big role in the success of your e-commerce business.

In episode 242 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Vince, and Kevin discuss:

• 02:31 – From Acting to E-Commerce
• 04:27 – A New Word for a Brand-New Platform
• 04:59 – The Adtomic Campaign Builder Sets It Apart
• 07:45 – Creating Stacked Rules and Workflows
• 10:00 – Adding Project Targeting Campaigns
• 11:04 – New Suggestions Offer a 90-Day Lookback
• 13:35 – Adtomic’s Four Campaigns
• 15:52 – Achieving Greater Control Over Your PPC Campaigns   
• 19:44 – PPC FAQs   
• 22:40 – What’s the Right Number of Targeted Keywords?
• 27:0 – Intelligent Rules Make for Better Campaigns
• 33:02 – First Question – What Are the Different Ad Types and Placements?   
• 33:55 – How to Get Adtomic
• 35:11 – The Power of Keyword Detail Pages   
• 37:01 – The Different Ways to Take Advantage of Helium 10’s Adtomic
• 40:44 – Kevin’s 30-Second PPC Tip

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, Google Podcast or wherever you listen to our podcast.

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.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon 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. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today’s our latest episode of PPC talk, where we give you the latest strategies in PPC, as well as a deep dive into Helium 10’s new advertising platform, Adtomic. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. We’ve got a couple of serious PPC guys on here today, our own Vince Montero and Kevin Shewey. How’s it going guys?

Vince: Pretty good. How are you, Bradley?

Kevin: Good to be here. Thank you.

Bradley Sutton: Doing awesome. All right. So, now we know all about Vince, but this is the first time Kevin has been on the show. So first of all, Kevin, what is your– I’m not even sure if I know this. What is your actual title here at Helium 10?

Kevin: That’s a great question. Right now, I am the team lead of account management right now. 

Bradley Sutton: Specifically about PPC?

Kevin: Specifically for PPC, I’m focusing on PPC in– we’re expanding sort of our account management and working with enterprise clients and I’m leading that team.

Vince: He’s also really good at helping me out with the content, which has been really great with this process for a couple of weeks.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s been great. So thank you.

Bradley Sutton: I want to go back further in time. I know you came from Prestozon, but even before then, what did you think you’re going to be when you grew up, when you were a little, did you grow up? I don’t even know where you live. Do you live in California?

Kevin: I do. I’m based in Los Angeles, I grew up in central California originally. And I’m an actor by training and that’s what I came to LA to do was to be an actor.

Bradley Sutton: Like a stage actor, or are you like a sag member?

Kevin: Both. I got my MFA in acting from UC Irvine, so right down there where the Helium 10 offices are located and moved to New York and did a couple of off-Broadway gigs and a couple of touring gigs and then settled back in LA. Because I like living over here a little better and yeah, found myself here in this space because I’ve worked in tech.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. How in the world do you go from acting to e-commerce?

Kevin: I know. What a jump, right? I was learning a lot of web design and coding and was in this spot developing apps, smaller level stuff. And I found myself doing some sort of data analytics applications and then got hooked up with Prestozon and sort of converted that into a PPC knowledge and e-com– and in working in the e-commerce space and just quickly got spun up with those Prestozon folks because they are all very smart people.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. What year do you start with Prestozon?

Kevin: I started with Prestozon– in just right at the end of 2018.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. So, you come from a varied background and we love to see that. That’s the whole point of why I ask all of our guests, regardless of we work for Helium 10 or not, you know, anybody who’s on this show is somewhat related to e-commerce, but it’s just interesting to see that we all come from different backgrounds, even being an actor and then going into being a PPC expert here. I love it. So, let’s just talk about this episode. I want to actually talk about our new kind of rebrand, I guess you could call it from the old platform that you manage your PPC and Helium 10 called ADS, and now it’s Adtomic. Right. So, Vince, I know you’ve played a role in naming some of our tools, was this a Vince-ism here or was this somewhere along the lines?

Vince: It kind of was and it kind of wasn’t. We had tossed around some names and that word Atomic was in the name and I liked it because it sounded similar to ADS. And then, I think someone on the creative team had the brilliant idea of just combining the word Ads with atomic and came out with Adtomic, which was at first I kind of was like, huh, what is that? And then, you know what it stuck and yeah, it’s definitely a new word for a brand new platform.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool, cool. So, now it is a brand new platform, but there’s going to be a lot of similarities. It’s not like, Oh, this is a brand new tool that people are going to be like, what is this? I mean, some people might not even notice that it is different. So let’s talk about those. Let’s maybe each of you take one thing that’s new and one thing that might be the same for now. So Vince, let’s just start with you. What would you say is the biggest difference between something that Adtomic has that ADS did not have?

Vince: Yeah, so the biggest thing is the campaign builder. We had a one page builder before if you’re using ADS, and you could build sponsored products and sponsored brands, but we’ve really flushed that out to be a lot more dynamic and much easier for the users to flow through it like a guide. So, at launch we’ll have two different campaign folders one’s called a quick builder and guided builder, and the names are implied. What they’re for ones really quick to get started. And the other one’s more of a guided one, but the really cool thing about both of these and all of our campaign builders, even down the line will be the templates that we’ve added. So, we’ve really tried to see from the user’s perspective or the seller’s perspective, where they are in their life cycle of this product? Is it a brand new product? Is it something they’ve never sold before? That’s going to have different requirements for launching campaigns versus someone who’s maybe been selling for a while and is using Adtomic for maybe– do manually before importing over their information to Adtomic, but they’ve got it running. So they’re going to run their campaigns just slightly differently. And we’ve also got even a template for liquidation. So if you’ve got a product that isn’t moving and you want to get rid of, or maybe a new version of your products coming out, we have templates in place to help our sellers really hone in on the goal of their product at the time that they’re launching these campaigns with Adtomic. Along with that though, are new rules that come along with that campaign builder, things like being able to automatically move a search term from your auto campaign into both your research broad campaign and an exact match in a performance campaign. We’re calling our proven campaign performance now, because we’re switching out kind of like the direction of that particular campaign, but users are now going to be able to do sponsored display campaigns, product targeting campaigns, which is something that we’ve wanted to do for a while since I launched ADS out of beta last September. But along with that comes a lot of different kinds of rules and functionality. So, Kevin is the one to speak about the new updates to the rules and how those might work.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Kevin, you noticed how I said, Hey, let’s just take one thing and then switch off. And then Vince just went ahead and just took like 17. Is there even anything left that you can take or they can talk about, Kevin?

Vince: Really, it’s just all one thing, it was just the campaign builder.

Kevin: The campaign builder. No, that’s great. Vince covered a lot. I just, I want to follow up and just expound on what you might use. Some of that specifically as bins was, uh, trying to pass off to me, the rules and the new things that you can do with that. And one of the things that we’ve seen users in the Prestozon space do with those rules is stack those rules and to create sort of cascading setups. And so now you can sort of have multiple rules firing on the same ad group. And I’ve seen some really, really incredible and sophisticated strategies with these keyword promotion rules that users have shown me out of necessity, they’re trying to get the system to do what they want it to do. And having that flexibility and customization allows them to find the workflow that works really well for them. So the one– the thing that I call out, it is a good sort of easy way to understand, like what stacking these rules can do is you can set up your initial keyword promotion rule that you set up an auto campaign on a sale, you promoted your performance, use the research campaign to find good keywords around that. And that’s great, but from there, one of the cool sort of advanced structure things I’ve seen is then you can do another rule that takes search terms in your performance campaign. And when that search term gets 50 sales and is running at a 5% ACoS, so this would be like a really, really high performing search terms in a campaign. You can then take those and promote up into a high performers campaign. So it lets you sort of tier your campaign structure in a really powerful way so that when you got a little extra ad spend, you can put it some extra budget. You can put it towards that high-performer campaign. And then you know that’s going to be a good return on your investment. Just one example of what you can do with sort of those advanced customizations on the rules.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. So then like, will there be in the past there’d be suggestions like, Hey, I’m in the auto campaign, I’ll see, I convert for ASINs. And then is it already here or is it coming or I could just click a button and move an ASIN from an auto campaign to the product targeting campaign? Or is that like a feature?

Vince: Yeah. Your light bulbs are going off. So yeah, currently in Ads, we have a three campaign builder. So if you get auto campaigns you get a lot of ASINs because of product targeting that Amazon’s very good at doing in their current iteration. We didn’t have a fourth campaign, so we’ve added product targeting campaigns into both our campaign builder, as well as the ability to use the edible rules features that Kevin just mentioned. So, you can literally right now just create a rule that goes from one auto campaign to your product targeting campaign. So, any ASINs that are converting well under the metrics that you established, then we’re going to automatically do that for you. And it’ll be by suggestions, you can go ahead and apply them, or you can even set that up to automate it. So it’ll do it for you automatically.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Cool. Anything else that’s new for Adtomic now, like right when somebody is listening to this episode, I know, we can talk a little bit later about what’s coming, but what else is new in Adtomic that Ads didn’t have either in the front or backend?

Vince: The one major update that also was included is two art suggestions. I’m a big proponent, a lot of listeners know, in listening to the trainings that I do of using our suggestions, but also doing longer-term views of 30, 60, 90 days. Well, the new suggestions are ready, going to include that 90 day look back. So we’re really going to be reducing if not completely getting rid of the need for users to have to do so. Of course, if they want to do longer than 90 day look backs, then they can. But on day one, when somebody started using Adtomic and I saw this in one of my accounts, as soon as those rules went live, it looked back 90 days. And so I got a bunch of different suggestions. And the interesting thing was I also noticed that I got suggestions on POS campaigns. And at first I thought, Hey, this must be a bug, but I was thinking about it. And I was talking to some more of the people here. And it’s actually great because let’s say you have a campaign that it’s been running for awhile, but you just can’t quite get it to convert and you just turn it off, right. You plan on going back and going through their search term report and finding the keywords that did well and then pulling those out. So you can put them into another campaign, right? This is what we would, I always teach is try to save a campaign if you can. Try not to pause it, but if you have to pause it, at least get the data out of it. Well, with our Adtomic rules, you can literally add that POS campaign into the rule. And it’ll do a 90 day look back, it’ll pull out the search terms that actually did well for you. And it puts them into the campaign that you designate.

Bradley Sutton: Kevin, anything else that maybe Vince has missed?

Kevin: If you’re coming onto the ADSplatform, now Adtomic new, you can sort of restructure an account and use that 90 day look back period that Vince is talking about to make that set up and just sort of clean up that account and get you searched for that might escalate quickly. Like that takes out so much of the friction and the time spent in cleaning those accounts. So it can be– it’s very cool. So nothing new, just me excited about what Vince has already said.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now Vince, like, let’s say, obviously I’ve been running something like in all my different accounts, 150, 160 campaigns using Ads. And I’ve, since ads couldn’t create product targeting campaigns, I had created those by myself in Seller Central, but like these existing campaigns, am I able to now, after the fact use Adtomic to tie like one of the product targeting campaigns to my three campaign structure, or I have to start from scratch?

Vince: You could tie it to the three campaign structures, you can tie it directly to the auto campaign, which makes sense. Because the auto campaign is– if you were going to build this from scratch, you’d have the ability to do the auto research, which is the broad match and then the performance, which is exact, and then the product targeting all at the same time. So, can we now have four. Four campaign setups for sponsor brands versus our previous three campaigns set up, but if you already have these campaigns, like you said, you’ve launched them in seller central. Then for this particular case for ASINs, all you’re going to do is create a rule for that auto campaign to send ASINs directly into that product targeting campaign. It’s just two rules. And the ability to do that, on the fly is– it’s something that we’re really proud of being able to do. It’s at the campaign level. These are just fine campaigns that they’re interested in creating rules around. And there’s a little cog icon. You can click through that and they can go through the steps to do that. But there’s also the ability to have an auto campaign add search terms into multiple different ad groups. So before we were limited to one campaign, one ad group at a time, right from the abroad to the research, to the proven. Now you can have an auto campaign running keywords into multiple different ad groups, or you can have a research campaign running search terms into multiple different ad groups. So lots of different strategies that are able to be created now using the Adtomic, not just the campaign builder, but also just the editable rules.

Bradley Sutton: Now we’ll come back to Adtomic in a little bit. I want to talk about what’s on the roadmap. Let’s just switch to just some strategy here, Kevin you’ve been, you’re a front facing person as far as talking directly with a lot of brands and the people who started using Prestozon, or now that you’ve been dealing with ads customers as well, like a lot of people who come from either another software or not using software at all and trying to manage their own PPC. Sometimes they’re just flabbergasted at like, Oh my God, I cannot believe I did this. And then now my ACoS is cut in half, right? I did this, and my PPC sales have doubled. What are some specific things that you’ve noted in your personal experience about things that people were not doing before and they started doing it and it just really has worked out for them?

Vince: Yeah. I mean, one of the things we talk a lot about is the way that these rules are set up, particularly with sort of the preferred strategy of search term isolation that allows you to get control in an account. It sort of doesn’t matter what your strategy is. If the levers you pull in your account to attempt to achieve that strategy aren’t effective, or anticipated because your changes aren’t having an effect. It sort of doesn’t matter what your strategy is. So one of the biggest things I hear from clients who particularly are coming from not using a tool, or using a tool that doesn’t use search for my isolation is they go, wow. Now I’m sort of like able to make these changes. And I see the effect it has. Whereas before, if I was changing a bid on one of my high spend keywords in my account, often what would happen is your impressions would just get shifted to another keyword that you had running in the ad group that was similar. And so, it makes it really hard to optimize in that way. So, the response we get time and time again is wow. Now I, first of all, the system and the setup inherently does some really great optimization in the cleaning up of those accounts that we see, but then they’re able to really either optimize what they have or scale really effectively.

Bradley Sutton: Now we’re going to start. So if you want to know where to get some product targeting ideas, another place is actually using Black Box. People think of Black Box as strictly product research, but there is a tab in Black Box called Product Targeting. So entering one or two or three of your main competitors ASINs and then filter out what is showing up for frequently bought together and customer also bought. Basically, those are the products that we have detected in the last 30 days of that seed product coming up on the page for frequently bought together, or customers also bought. And sometimes they’re not just direct exact copies of the same product or direct competitors, but complimentary products. So those sometimes are great products to target in your first product targeting campaign.

Bradley Sutton: What about you, Vince? Anything new that you’re hearing, not just from our own customers, but just in general, like some different PPC strategies that people are using that are effective that we maybe haven’t talked about before?

Vince: Honestly, the bulk of the strategies that I’m seeing are all related to sponsored display. So, of course this is for our sellers that are brand registered. If you do have that, you can get access to sponsored display. Amazon’s doing some really amazing things with that particular ad type, a lot of the placements that are available, that they’re expanding used to be only available to DSP. So, the more sellers understand the importance of leveraging those placements for those ad units. I’m seeing a definite shift in spend even towards that. And then audience targeting, which I was at first, a little bullish about is getting better. They’ve made a lot of refinements over the past, just the past couple of months. A lot that you can even do, as an example, when you’re doing product targeting campaigns, you can select categories. Well, you can do that now with audiences too. It’s so they’re opening up a lot of the features that were previously only locked for DSP and a lot still are, but Amazon’s really doing some interesting things with making a lot of features and functionalities from the DSP available to their browsers or sellers and those sellers that take advantage of that are early adopters of those placements and taking advantage of the strategies that come with those placements are really seeing some great, great results.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. I want to talk about some frequently asked questions, like we see stuff kind of over and over, so I’m going to give you guys a couple of them. And then, you guys can talk about other ones that you hear commonly, and here’s, I’m going to start off with the one thing that I wouldn’t need to work here anymore. If I had a dollar for every time, somebody, I see this coming up in social media, but we have talked about it before, but let’s talk about again with the information that Amazon gives currently, why is dayparting not a good move right now? First of all, there’s people who might be like, what the heck is dayparting. Let’s define dayparting first.

Vince: Dayparting is strictly having your accounts come on and off during the day at different points of the day, you have a product and you only want it to be on between 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM Pacific time, right? That’s dayparting. If you’re a very large seller and you have a lot of data to back that up, I could see that that being beneficial if you’re a brand new seller, if you’re a seller and you’re one year, I really think that the potential losses that you get from doing the day party are the cons outweigh the potential pros. Number one, we all know that especially for PPC, there’s a seven day and a 14 day pixel. So you can have somebody click on your sponsored brand ads, for example, and 14 days later they buy it. So if you’re looking at data strictly from when am I making sales well, are you looking at the right windows? And then are you– how do you look backwards to say, Oh, that the sponsored product sale is actually from six days ago. Amazon really doesn’t give that kind of information. They just have the attribution window and the sales get applied and they get adjusted all the time. So if you’re trying to make decisions on what time of day you should be on or off, or are really dealing with a hundred percent accurate information in order to be able to even make that call there, there could be somebody logged on at 3:00 AM in the morning, right. When you don’t think you’re going to make a sale, but they see your ad. And a week later they click on it at 7:00 AM.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. And you would have no idea when that clicked–

Vince: For newer sellers. I definitely say that the cons outweigh the pros. But that being said, we are working on– there are upcoming things we are doing that lean into the rationale behind dayparting that we’ll see in atomic, maybe late this year.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now this is for either of you, another common question I see all the time is for an exact campaign, which we’re now calling a performance campaign and a research campaign, which is broad phrase or broad match. What is the max number of targets one should have? The max number of exact phrases you’re targeting in a performance and the max number of keywords you’re targeting in a broad campaign?

Vince: Yeah. So this is a good one, because I get this one a lot too, and I keep forgetting to address it in my TACoS Tuesdays. So, when we talk about campaign structures, I’m a very big proponent of making sure that you are putting search terms that have similar search volumes in your campaign. If yours is a research campaign, if you’ve got really high volume search terms, maybe you should only put all of those into one campaign, but try to maybe 10 because you really want to make sure you have enough budget to test those high search volume broad keywords. If you’ve got really low search volume, broad keywords then, but those in a different campaign, because they’re not going to get any budget because if you put them, if you mix them with the highest search volume broad keywords, then the lower ones aren’t going to get any. So what I find is that when our tool starts moving or suggesting keywords to be moved into a new campaign, like for example, from the research to the performance campaign, people are getting questions about, Oh, wait a second. You said, I shouldn’t have any more than 10 keywords in that proven campaign. Yes. But that was for testing. That was when you started the campaign, as long as you’re getting the impressions that you need for those keywords, that was the goal of having those limitations. So, when a keyword is being promoted and being moved into that performance campaign, it’s proven itself, right? So you don’t have to worry about that. Now, what you will need to worry about, probably just increasing the budget of that performance campaign, but that is the point of that performance campaign, finding the keywords. So, you could end up with 20, 25, high performing keywords, if you’re lucky, in the high performance campaign.

Kevin: Yeah. I just want to throw it like a useful way that I’ve sort of thrown out to folks and I’m just repeating what Vince has said in a little different way. Check the average CPC in the ad group. And if you’re, I’ve had people ask this, they’re running a daily budget of $10 in a campaign and their CPC is 50 cents per click. You get 20 clicks in that ad group before you’re done for the day. So if you can think about that, like what’s your average CPC in that ad group and then divide by your daily budget. That’s how many clicks you get for the ad group a day. And then think about how clicks against your keywords. If I’ve got 20 clicks in my ad group, and I’m running 800 keywords, how many clicks, how many days am I going to go before I’m really getting good data on those keywords to make good optimization decisions.

Bradley Sutton: Let’s say we’ve reached our limit. Like, somebody says, you know what? I only want to do a max of 30 exact, or I want to do a max of 10 broad or whatever. All right. Now that means I need to create a new one. So in Adtomic, for example, does that mean I need to create a new structure of three or I can tie multiple research campaigns into one auto family or do I have to do different three campaign setups for each time I need to add another one of those campaign?

Vince: So, the big shift with Adtomic too, is that rules, even though you can edit them at the campaign level and add them to the campaign level, it’s not dependent on the structure anymore. So in the previous iteration, it was the auto campaign to the research, to the proven. Well, number one automatically, we’ve already set it up. The auto campaign will drive keywords to both the research and the performance, sorry, not proven and also a product targeting campaign, but you can also add other ad groups into that rule. So, instead of it being a campaign structure, just for one site or one product, you can have, maybe you have different variations. Maybe you’ve got different colors, different sizes, and you’re running campaigns against those. You can also add the ad groups from those campaigns into a rule. So it’s kind of like the rules are being kind of pulled out, in a sense, there will eventually actually, which will make this a much clearer fact that a feature iteration will have the rules being on their page. So it’s like the concept is you’re creating the rule, right, that you want. And then you’re just adding the ad groups then from the campaigns. Now, obviously you have to be smart about this because you want to have those rules be for the same type of product, right? You could technically in Adtomic you could create a rule and have your auto egg tray campaign run to your auto or your research coffin campaign, which would be bad, right?

Bradley Sutton: I couldn’t do that in ADS.

Vince: You couldn’t do that. We wouldn’t want you to do that, but the rules are not necessarily tied into that box of that structure anymore because we have given the sellers the ability to choose different ad groups from different campaigns that they would like to select for.

Shivali: All right, guys, that sound means it’s time for our CAT. Our CAT of the episode stands for Clubhouse After Party Tip. Once a week, we go live on the clubhouse app and bring back former Serious Sellers Podcast guests. We take live questions from you and they give you their best tip out there. So, every episode we’re going to be giving you guys clips from these episodes we’ve been doing on clubhouse, so you can get some great strategies from our former guests. Now, if you have the clubhouse app, make sure to search for the club Serious Sellers Podcast and follow it so that you can be notified when we go live. You can also follow our director of training on h10 Bradley in this clip, we had Kevin King, who is the master behind Freedom Ticket and an e-comm legend on the clubhouse call to answer your questions. If you would like to listen to Kevin’s latest episode, it is episode 216.

Guest: So my question is, have you ever used the Amazon posting and live rank? People posting and just doing the live introduction to your products? Also, if you’re using, how do you major it? How can we reach out? There’s any website, like [inaudible] influencer, we can’t find out and attract them regarding the list.

Kevin King: I don’t have the list, but there’s like three or four agencies that I know of that are doing that right now, online. And as far as the post, I don’t know if an agency, I’m sure there’s someone that’s offering as a service that does post, but I have someone– you can have a VA do it yourself. You have brand registry to do that. Then you can get access to an Amazon post. And right now it’s still free. At some point they might charge for it, but you can post in there and you can cross, we use it for a couple of our brands. It’s hit or miss. Some of the stuff actually can get you some sales. And some of it’s a waste of time, to be honest. But it’s worth giving it a shot. And if nothing else, it’s just some, some more real estate, it’s more brand awareness there. The unfortunate thing is you can’t control where you show up. So like some of our posts we’ll get six, 10,000 impressions sometimes or more. Other ones for whatever reason to get like 200. And we haven’t been able to figure out why that is, even though we’re using some of the same targeting and experimenting around, but you can cross promote your products. And it will show up on some of the other pages on others, on your competition’s pages. So it’s worth playing with just don’t expect it to generate millions of dollars for you at this point. And that’s down the road, it might turn to something, but right now it’s still in beta and they’re still trying to kind of figure it out just a few months ago. They finally actually see what your click rate is and stuff. They didn’t even offer that until just a few months ago. So it’s still up and coming. But if you have run out of products, experiment within yourself. It may turn out to be worth it, or it may just be a nice little extra thing for you.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Going back to Kevin, and back to our conversation about frequently asked questions. You probably deal with more one-on-one customers that both Vince and I combined, what are– over the last six months, what is like some common questions you get? And it doesn’t necessarily have to be about Prestozon or Adtomic, just PPC questions in general. Like these last couple of ones that we’ve talked about, what do you see recurring over and over again?

Kevin: The addition of those ASIN keyword promotion rules has been a big problem for a lot of sellers who maybe weren’t utilizing that part of their account. There’s a lot of revenue to be generated from that spot. So, we were getting a lot of questions around that time. Frankly, folks who were, who were learning about that, who in some cases weren’t aware that that product targeting was a different placement. One of the cool things about being in the PPC spaces is Amazon is iterating and improving and finding new ways to advertise products. And so we get the quarter, the fun job of keeping up with that, and then finding the best ways and most effective ways for users to do it.

Bradley Sutton: Back to Vince. Any other common questions you’ve been getting from your TACoS Tuesdays, or just talking to customers?

Vince: I always seem to get the same question actually every other week. And it’s, what’s your best strategy for launching your PPC? So the answer used to be, just use ads to create your three campaigns at once. And now it’s going to be use Adtomic to create four sponsored product game things at once. So, that you take care of that issue that Kevin just mentioned of not being able to utilize your ASINs effectively in a product targeting campaign. And also to Kevin’s point, yeah, I’ve done an actual education, educating people that where are the different placements? In fact, two training ago, I literally just went on Amazon and just showed all the sellers where all the placements were, which were sponsored products, which sponsored products, product targeting, and then sponsored display, sponsored brands and the product targeting versions for both of those. So I think that the most common thing is sellers just not knowing what all the different ad types are and where they’re located and which campaign gets you access to those ad placements. So I would say, as a rule of thumb, that my biggest suggestion to brand new sellers is just really taking the time to learn that yes, the search results page ads that are there are very important. But there’s tons of other ad placements.

Bradley Sutton: Let’s go back to Adtomic now, as far as we’ve talked about the new things that are already available from day one. And actually before we do that, before we go into future things, we have some like promotions or something for people who activate Adtomic, Vince?

Vince: Yeah, we do. So far, I believe it depends on what level you’re already on. If you’re not a Diamond subscriber, then you need to have Diamond to get access to Adtomic. And we’re offering some $200 promotions for that. So, by the time this airs, that email will have gone out, so we are offering that. And all that means is if they spend $200 in PPC within 30 days of them first logging into Adtomic, they’ll get a refund, a rebate. There are some different promotions out there like our free and leads. And I know that for getting into the platinum level, even a platinum level is kind of our gateway to Adtomic because platinum level does actually include both the dashboard and the analytics sections of atomic, which are both account level overview. So it’s not granular, but you can still do a lot with that information technically if you used it correctly.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. So then now looking forward to what’s like, in a few weeks, in a few months, things that– I know you can’t spoil everything for us, but what are either of you able to tell us about?

Kevin: I’m really excited for launching the keyword detail and the search term detail pages in Adtomic, which are really, really powerful. They give you some really great insight into what’s going on. The keyword detail page is a really, really granular look at a keyword. There are charts at the keyword level, so you can sort of see the performance in short view of a keyword over time. You can map the bid changes over that, see how it’s infected impressions, really, really cool visual representations of the data at the keyword level for that, which is really insightful, really powerful to use there. And then the search term detail page is amazing. You can see the effect that moving a search term around and having it managed by different keywords over its journey through even just your basic auto research performance structure happens. Or if you’re in a situation where search term isolation is not a viable in the traditional sense for your account, and you’re managing the search term through multiple keywords, you can see how your bid changes on those individual keywords affect the search term performance, getting that granular view and understanding how the changes in your account. I was kind of talking earlier about strategy changes and making sure that they’re effective. This is where you can see it. You can see it at the search term level. When I make a change, when I adjust my bids in these places, look at what it’s doing to the search term. The impressions trade off between keywords. All of that is something you can see in the search term details page. And I think it’s a game changer for sellers who are able to leverage that in their accounts and it’s a really big value add.

Bradley Sutton: Can you talk briefly about if somebody is an existing Helium 10 member, what’s the difference? Like some people are under the mistaken impression that only if you’re on the diamond plan and above you have access to Ads or what’s now known as Adtomic.

Vince: Yeah. So, that’s still true. That’s the full capabilities and functionality are available only to diamond and up. But at platinum level, like I was saying before, you do still get access to the dashboard and analytics and having access to that information at platinum level is still– you could use the information that you find there in order to influence whatever strategy you’re doing, if you’re manually optimizing your campaigns. So that’s great. You could still look at analytics and see all of your search term data right there within a few clicks for sellers that are doing things manually. They know how time consuming it is to look through search term reports, download search term reports, look through them, save to get historical data, be able to save a search report, month to month, or month after month. And then put those together, cobble those together, maybe in Google sheets or a larger Excel file. So having that accessibility, even at platinum, to just look at our analytics and within a few clicks, do some filtering, find your search terms that are performing poorly, make sure that you make notes and make them negative, and find good ones potentially that you can then use for campaigns. So, the difference, for example, in that section that I just described in the search term level is that diamond and level up actual Adtomic users can do certain functionalities. Like they can create the negative right then and there. So not only do they get access to the data right away in the way that they want to see it by filtering ACoS, or spend or clicks, however they’re trying to optimize, they can also actually make the search term negative from that ad group in that campaign it’s founded right then and there, whereas in platinum level, it’s read only. So, but still, like I said, there’s still some powerful things that you could do with that data, even at the platinum level.

Bradley Sutton: Guys, if you’re already a Helium 10 paying member, then go without saying, give Adtomic a try, and then see what it can do for you. If you’re not using Helium 10 yet, or you’re a brand new seller, absolutely guys, start sign up with Helium 10, and try it out for a couple of months. You’re going to be happy about the things they can do. I’ve always told my story before about how when I was a consultant for Amazon sellers, way before my time at Helium 10, I never, never learned PPC. I was like something that was always just like, you know what? PPC is too tough for me, like, I don’t want to have to like learn how to do it, but because of ads I was able to learn how to do it now, managing over 160 campaigns in like two, three hours a week. If you’re not a Helium 10 member yet, you want to try it out for 50% off your first month, you can use the podcast code SSP50, but if you think you’re going to use it for a while, then don’t use that code. Use the code SSP10, which pretty much saves you 10% off for life. The SSP50 gives you 50% off your first month. And we haven’t done our TST. I almost forgot it. Vince has done lots of TST, which is our TST, 30-second Tip. Since this is Kevin’s first time on the show, we’re going to have you give our 30-second tip of the week. Something PPC related that you can say 30 seconds a minute or less. What’s a strategy that you can share with our listeners that’s pretty valuable and actionable, that’s pretty fast.

Kevin: Yeah. I got something that I was just talking to somebody the other day about. Mine’s about ACOS targets. That’s sort of how we set our bid optimization algorithm in Adtomic now. And, just a word of warning there. You might come in, you might see a performance campaign that’s running at 50% ACoS on average across all those there. And you want to get it down to 15, 20% whatever’s appropriate for you. So your impulse might be to set that target ACoS to exactly what you want it to be. And I want to warn against that. That can actually have some adverse effects. And in some cases it can pull the bid down on your high-performing keywords because the optimization algorithm is trying to get to what your ACOS that you’ve set. Instead, one of the things that I’ve seen that’s most effective is to graduate that target ACOS down. If it’s running at 50 right now, try setting it down to 45 or 40. And then when it gets there, when the actual performance is there, then you bring the target ACOS down again. So, if you’re new to the Adtomic or PPC in general, and you see that target ACOS, know that you want to bring that down slowly. You’re going to have a better time getting to your target that way.

Bradley Sutton: Well, I actually, the way the suggestions and Adtomic works, it doesn’t take you all the way down. So, that’s pretty cool. All right. Well, Vince and Kevin, thank you very much for all the hard work. You guys have been putting into it to try and get Adtomic out there. It’s so cool to see, and we know that this is just the beginning, lots of exciting things in store. And so we’ll definitely be bringing you guys back later on this year to see what’s new, but. Thank you guys very much for coming on and we’ll see you guys in the next episode.

Kevin: Thank you.

Vince: Thanks, Bradley.