Amazon PPC with Abe Chomali - Standard Campaign Setup, Catch-all Campaigns, Product Targeting

hi everyone this is Yelena from Amazonia PPC and today I have a very special guest with me uh Mr Abe tamali who has his own uh agency today we're going to talk about uh multiple strategies some of the mandatory parts of the strategy he uses for his uh account management as well as uh most recent uh event that happened in New York uh last week for the sgpg event um a welcome and uh thank you for being here today with us well thank you for having me I'm uh happy to give some of my time to uh help you and your audience a little bit we're happy to have you um can tell us a little bit more about yourself you have a very rich experience u in generally speaking in marketing even before entering Amazon Marketplace so we're happy to hear a little bit more about it sure so um yeah that's definitely true um I've actually been selling since 1991 I've been around for a while even before there was internet um I was selling electronics and we were advertising in the back of different magazines so we take uh half page and full page advertisements and take phone calls all day long and answer questions you know so that was a whole adventure for almost a decade before there was an internet to sell into uh once the internet came along we were one of the first people selling on the internet we started out with Yahoo stores you know that was a nice platform which gave us an ability to work off of Yahoo's Network and also to uh to to have a pre-built set for product pages sort of like what Amazon is doing now for sellers um Yahoo stores went for a few years and then we migrated to having our own website um we did that for close to another decade until Amazon came along and started taking all the business uh you know from everywhere else and uh for the past decade I was selling on Amazon um about two years ago uh a couple of people that I knew came to me and asked me for help with their accounts uh specifically with their advertising and um as I started to help them I said you know this is a good amount of work and I'm actually enjoying it maybe I'll take over your accounts for you uh they were very happy to have me do that um and I was excited to see that the experience I had in electronics translated very well to other product categories um and I started to say to myself maybe this is an interesting way to use my experience in a way that's uh more creative than just working on the 2018 model of the digital camera instead of the 2017 or 2016 model um spent six months working with those couple of clients I liked it very much they were very happy with the results and at the beginning of 2019 I started to do this full-time so right now I'm about a year in and a year into Consulting full-time I've got uh about three dozen clients across almost all of the categories in Amazon and um it's been very interesting seeing a lot about what happens on Amazon from a lot of different viewpoints of sellers yes it's um always very exciting I can understand your point of view as we also run a Consulting business and there are many many different angles and uh business strategies that people use that you have access to that you can you know applied across accounts but there's also a healthy amount of testing that needs to be done in order to figure out you know what works and what doesn't but um yeah um tell us a little bit about the services that your agency offers so the main service I offer is managing advertising for people that sell on Amazon um I run the PPC campaigns I create the PPC campaigns um you know there are of course many different types of advertising Amazon that go into the display advertising and retargeting so I work with all of those types of advertising for Sellers and although that's the main focus it does connect to other services as well so I help clients with listings I can create listings or fix listings um I can help them optimize their listings by doing uh competitive research on their products against the against the uh environment that's on Amazon um I also do General Consulting one of the things that people like about working with me is that I do have broad experience in a very competitive environment I have had my listings taken over and I've had hijackers and I've had law you know I've had lawsuits that have I've had to file and I've been the target of fluit so nothing almost nothing a client tells me will be something that I haven't heard of before and um clients want that help so it turns into actual Consulting so I can help people strategize and put issues into perspective and find both short-term and long-term planning for their business models um I don't necessarily do that for anybody that comes along but I'll typically offer it as an additional service for people that I'm working with on Advertising so it's really advertising plus yeah the best way to describe the model is advertising plus and it is the most um appropriate version of the advertising Serv at least for Amazon in my experience just doing PPC is not always going to be enough because there are so many other things that affect PPC results so you have to like dabble in product listing optimization and copywriting and add you know imagery design and and stuff like that that does help conversion rates rise overall but it also helps you know bpc when when you actually look at it so I definitely understand course one of the first yeah I mean one of the first things we do whenever a client or a prospect comes to me is we don't just look at what's happening inside the Amazon account the first thing we have to do is look at their actual listings and in a lot of cases I can do everything that's available to do within Seller Central but unless they have seven pictures instead of one picture that they took with their phone they're not going to sell no matter what we spend on Advertising so and those that's happened in some cases you know we'll add a full image set or we'll add EDC to account that is mysteriously brand you know they took the time and the effort to register their brand but never did any of the next steps that uh with the tools that are available for them so I'll tell them You' got brand registry you're eligible for all different extra programs you need to start working with those programs and it'll all tie in together exactly exactly like you know when the when e-commerce business starts to grow there's many things to deal with and Outsourcing can be really really helpful just to have someone to handle that portion of work so that you can focus on what you do best which is usually sellers that are most successful they're uh usually best at doing product research and development and then you know negotiation with suppliers shipment stuff just there's overall a lot of work to be done and um usually they'll find partnership uh with marketing very helpful um okay so I would definitely agree with that I um we we before this uh call we discuss some topics that we we wanted to cover and um I had a suggestion that you might share some of the strategies and some of the four basics of what do you cover your strategies in every account like for example if there's one thing that you would recommend sellers to never miss out on what would that be sure so I'll answer that in two parts the first thing I'll say is one thing that sellers always need to do and take the effort to do is whenever they're setting up product campaigns is to put every single skew that they're advertising in a separate product group um no product group should have more than one skill and the reason for that is part of what we do with advertising is to refine it over time we will want to give you know campaigns that work you want to give them more budget campaigns that don't work and Search terms that don't work you'll want to make them negative or adjust bids you know there's a lot to do over time it's not just set it up and run it and what ends up happening is the way we do all those adjustments is by focusing on and understanding the data that Amazon gives us from campaigns that are running the way that Amazon gives us that data is with the search term report and they'll typically tell us a term or an Asin or you know some you know whatever the data point might be they'll tell us performance within a group and if we have more than one product in a group we can't tell what the data is telling us about so I was giving you an example before we got you know before we started the video of color t-shirts so if a seller has red and green and blue t-shirts and they put them all into one group and then say for example they start getting clicks for orange T-shirts if this orange T-shirt clicks are not selling you don't know whether they came to the product page of the red t-shirt or the green t-shirt or the blue t-shirt so you don't know which one to stop the ad you know stop that orange T-shirt for on the other hand if your style might have a lot of orange in it even though it's considered a BL or green t-shirt and you're getting a lot of sales on it and you want to increase the advertising again you won't know which of the colors are actually making the sales for orange so by putting each skew into its own product group you'll know what the Search terms are matching to and that goes across for you know across many different situations if you have an account which is um has hundreds or thousands of products in it and you want to run a catchall campaign that just gives coverage to every everything you sell don't put all of the products into one group because you won't be able to tell what the advertising works for by giving each product its own group you'll be able to tell what's successful what's not successful and then to grow out advertising from there so that's the answer to the first part of a sort of a mistake that I see a lot of sellers make and something to be cautious of it's a little bit extra work to give a a group to every single skew but it's important um the second thing is the as far as how to set up and how to run your accounts of course every type of account and every type of product will have its own special needs but there is a standard setup that we use uh the first thing is that uh we'll typically give campaigns over to one product so if a seller has three different products if they have a blanket and a towel and a t-shirt we typically won't put those items together for advertising purposes each one will get their own campaigns um but in addition to that for each product that we're advertise so for that towel we'll start off with four campaigns most commonly we'll start off with an auto campaign we'll start off with a campaign for each of the three match types for uh broad phrase and exact and by doing that it lets us tailor the advertising campaigns the advertising budgets the spend you know over to each type we found that um when people have a manual campaign and that manual campaign just has all three match types in it that it can get very messy quickly especially when one type of campaign is outperforming or is very far behind the others it's harder to make adjustments when they're grouped together in a campaign so we'll start off with those we'll start off with those four and we'll let them run for a bit whether it's a week or a month uh depending on the amount of traffic those camp get uh till we get a nice amount of data to analyze and then we'll start to make adjustments there are other campaign types there are product targeting and there are sponsored brands that run across the top of the page uh there's display advertising but typically to start where we're just figuring out where the product fits in the marketplace we'll start off with those Basics and then see what's most appropriate to go forward with I see um when you say C all campaigns can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that because you know that's a phras that's a phrase that usually comes from PPC professionals that who know what it is but if there are some many some sellers who might be interested in hearing more about what's the strategy behind the catall campaigns can you tell us a little bit more so of course so that starts off with a basic idea that Amazon likes advertising to be running on every product if there are two competing products that are almost exactly identical Amazon will give a better position to the item that is running advertising um a client once a client that is a very large seller on Amazon once showed me a checklist of different points that Amazon likes to see in a listing for example they like to see a full set of images they like to see characters over you know a title that's over a certain amount of characters they like to see bullets that are certain sizes there's a list of things they like to see um for example if there's A+ content that's better of than a listing that doesn't have A+ content one of the items on that checklist is advertising is advertising running on this product and if it's running it gets a better position it's not necessarily going to be the best versus the worst but it's part of the big picture so in general we want to try to run advertising for everything a seller sells um even if it's a small amount we still want to have it running and what we'll typically do if a seller has many many products and they don't want to give a full advertising push to every single product they sell will'll simply put all of their products into one automatic campaign and that automatic campaign can have a small budget or a large budget whatever the seller is comfortable with but they can know that by having everything in that campaign everything is getting advertised it's getting advertised somewhere whether it's a little bit or a lot everything is getting some kind of coverage it makes Amazon happy it can give them um unexpected information about what works or doesn't work as we watch the reports come in but uh basically it's going to be a campaign that catches all their inventory and that's where the term comes from so all their inventory goes into that campaign and um basically what we'll do is every product in that campaign will have its own group uh even if they're different sizes of of apparel or even if there are different quantities of something that's multipacks each product will get its own group within the campaign and as the campaign runs we'll have more data and always the data we'll have will match to existing to exact products so that's a key awesome and how do you uh act when you find it like for example you just take an over an account and you see that it doesn't have that perfect structure and but on the other hand it does have a lot of orders a lot of you know data that you have available to you but at the same time um are would you be afraid of U that dip in performance in the meantime until you restructure everything when you restructure and then it gets reindexed and everything starts collecting data again um what are your experiences with doing restructuring of the campaigns that previously didn't have such a this structure so well I'll tell you what I started doing and I'll tell you what I do now when I started out I basically had a couple of clients that were doing okay but they were very clear holes in what they were doing you know certain things that were important were missing and what I did was I rebuilt all of their campaigns in structure that had worked for me and that was very very bad for the account because everything that was doing well did not do well with the new structure even though the new structure was set up perfectly and it works with other campaigns and other accounts um the overall account performance in that situation went down what I learned is that um Amazon likes existing campaigns that have history they like it and they prefer it so what I do now is I have to be very delegate um and what I'll do is I'll try to isolate the best performing parts of what exists right now I will leave those I won't touch them and I will just try to add delicately to additional you know additional campaigns and fixing things that don't work so I'll give you an example I have a I have a client that um sells bath products you know items for the bathroom and um they had the issue that U they had six or seven products in the same in the same group uh which as I mentioned a moment ago is something they shouldn't be doing now the simplest way to fix a situation like that is to stop that campaign and start a whole bunch of new ones but in that account the number one skew was selling 4,000 units a month and all of the weaker SKS were selling 20 50 80 units a month so what I did was I paused the campaigns of all of the poor performing SKS I gave those their own advertising and I let that campaign keep running with its best skew and as far as Amazon is concerned nothing changed for that skew yeah and that worked it actually worked very well all of the SKS that started getting their own campaigns almost immediately went up anywhere from two to 5x in sales once they started getting their own campaigns um so and one of the things we realized is that um that campaign was using up most of its budget every day but we realized was that all of the budget was going to the bestselling skew all of the other ones had no spend available to make sales once we started giving them their own campaign and can adjust campaign budgets for each one they like to spend money also and they started generating sales both head sales and organic sales as rank went out my experience is exactly the same we're also very very delicate when we're doing restructuring and it usually is you know partial one part by one part and just like uh couple of campaigns at a time simply because um you know there's nowhere officially said that Amazon does this but I very much think that they take into an account of historical performance at least for the last couple of weeks of each campaign and assign quality scores to it similar uh to the example from Google like if you probably if you ran uh ads on Google you probably know their are quality scores to keywords and campaigns um and Google also doesn't officially assign quality scores to campaigns but I know for sure that they are taking into account last 28 days performance um when they're assigning keyword qualities course and I think that's that's exactly what happens to Amazon campaigns and that's the reason why you know these performance dips are happening every time restructures so that's definitely something to keep in mind and when it comes to these cat all campaigns um there's this small twist to that strategy approach that I've heard some of our colleagues do very successfully and that's like putting all uh it's very similar you put all the products inside the same campaign and assign them like very very small bits maybe like five to 10 cents uh per click and just put uh the campaign bid strategy on fixed uh bidding and a very large budget so for example if we have a couple of thousands uh of skills in that campaign you assign $1,000 per day on that campaign and it really doesn't spend a lot but it does show your products during those times of the day when there isn't a lot of traffic going on like for example 2: am. um 3:00 a.m where the rest of the competition already depleted their budgets and that's when you show up and you're the only one you know actually offering a bid and it's 10 cents so if someone clicks you don't pay exactly for a lot um and whenever a sale happens it's cheap that's what we've seen and uh usually when you have like a huge portfolio it works really well um both as a catch all campaign but also some kind of you know cheap type that that will generate you cheap a cost sales um over time like like an additional income stream which is um interesting we have similar points of views and um that's the kind of similar setting that we have in our sponsor products campaigns with different variations of course depending on the nature of the account and the category and all of the specifics they're also always present and um when it comes to product targeting do you have any kind of you know uh patterns in which cases you prefer using it so I just want to add one to what you said and this is part of what makes um the uh the marketing space on Amazon so interesting uh which is that we don't know exactly why things happen um you were mentioning that uh you can get you can get traffic at uh times of day when people might not be advertising but um my theory as to why those low clicks work is actually a little bit different and uh I I think that there's a value to the thinking but we can't know for sure so my thinking is this when you bet when you bid 15 cents or 10 cents you will typically show up on page two three 12 of a of the search what happens is by the time a shopper gets to that far down the listings have very poor relevance to whatever the seller is searching for so most of the people that far down will have either Poe quality listings or it just ranks randomly for one of the words in the search but most of what's on the page is not great however if your listing is relevant to the search term and you are on page six you automatically become the Superstar of page six yeah and the Shopper might be tired of going through all those pages they suddenly have something that looks so much better than everybody else and you've got that sale so it's not the same as running in a time when nobody is advertising you're running when everybody is advertising but you are appealing to a very specific group of people who go well past the first couple of pages that might also be the reason exactly like you know there are some strategies where people specifically Target those lower placements because not everyone sees that value in them when actually they can actually turn into your competitive Advantage right yeah I don't know that for I don't know that there are so many situations where a strategy of targeting page eight is really going to be useful um I think people that are talking about that I don't know what to say about people who are talking about that but there are very very limited situations where that will be useful if you have a skew which sells 15,000 units a month and you are doing as well as possible at the top of every one of your terms yes you'll squeeze a couple of extra percentage points by having extra display space on page seven but that doesn't really work for most sellers um you know typically giving that much attention to that strategy is not worth the time you're spending on it I prefer to say more like a you know a lowcost bid will give you some results and there's a couple of ways to think about it but be happy with what you're getting exactly that's that's the approach with that campaign type yes now tell me your question again because I forgot yeah that was totally on point what you just said um yeah about the product targeting so we have keyword targeting pretty much covered here with the basics but when it comes to product targeting how do you decide to include product targeting as part of your strategy so there are three ways that I use product targeting and three ways that I evaluate product targeting the simplest way is as the advertising runs especially with auto campaigns Amazon is automatically putting your products on competing product bases and you'll see in your search reports as so that means that Amazon showed your product uh The Shopper like your product better than what the as was and they chose your product if you get enough conversions like that and it's competitive you want to intentionally be on those product PES simple as that you weren't aware of it before Amazon told you that you're relevant now you're going to be intentional about it so that's number one that's really the best way because it already works and you know it already Works um the second way is trying to estimate where you think you should perform well so if you have a product and that works best with mature products so if you have 20 reviews and a low price it's very clear that you should uh Target a competitor with much fewer reviews and a higher price you should convert well in those cases um it's not automatic that you will which is why it's not the preferred way to do things but also again with mature products or a product that you see is new to Market and could be a direct competitor yes you'll intentionally want to focus on those people uh the third thing that I do is a little bit of a Twist which is to compete against my own SKS so if I have five different variations of a skew I will run all of those variations in product targeting against each other and because they're highly relevant they are exactly that product page am usually able to put more of the spots in that Carousel with my products so if somebody looks for a water bottle they'll see my water Bott once they're on my page a third of the units will be my water bottle sponsored products as opposed to them going to a different brand I'm blocking everyone else out because I'm intentionally putting myself there and that actually works really well for keeping people within my product selection that's very interesting I heard about that strategy and um have you tested maybe how it works for upsell potential like for example if someone is selling shampoo uh to Target you know your own shampoo with your conditioner for example uh I actually have targeted that well so here's the thing um I I run campaigns like that and it performs um but I haven't tested it on its own exclusive of everything else so what I mean is that uh say there is uh you know say there's a shampoo and I have h four different scents of the shampoo I'm advertising like I told you the four different scents on the product page now I am also advertising a bundle of shampoo and conditioner and all of those will sell what's nice is that with the shampoo and conditioner I'm typically getting extra margin because you're cutting down as nothing else you're cutting down on the FBA fees you're getting charged for two separate sales yeah so um it does end up giving me a piece of the business more profitably what I don't know is how good it is as an upsell specifically because it's just part of that whole picture of some sales going to something else besides what the main you know search was uh but it definitely does give you some extra piece of business interesting do you find yeah I I actually had a conversation with a client about this once they sell they have a a product that sells um several thousand units a month across a bunch of colors and they made a multi pack and uh the multi pack sells sells a few dozen pieces a month so I told the client and you know listen you're rolling out all these multi packs and it's getting an increase you know you're getting sales of those multi packs but your overall unit count isn't really growing so I'm not sure how much time you should spend making all of these additions and he actually told me he goes you're missing the point if I sell 3,000 units of that individual skew yeah versus uh 2700 and 300 of the others I am more profitable now so I'm very happy introducing those others I'd rather shift even a small piece of my sales to the more profitable skew even if my overall count doesn't rise up and uh yeah that's just one of the times I learned something from my clients yeah I I can totally relate um my clients are my like ongoing training in most of the cases you can hear all kinds of things and just be blown away many times so that's that's super interesting larger larger client larger clients got to be larger because they're generally smart so they almost always have something to teach us that's true that's totally true um with that kind of approach um the first thing that comes up my mind is that with bundles you're not always able to be super specific with keyword targeting so you have to use alternative um approaches like maybe you know display targeting or maybe you know sponsor Brands what is your approach with targeting bundles how do you handle that so I don't have a very specific approach it's really dependent on the products sometimes bundles will be multi packs sometimes bundles will be unrelated items that have a loose connection and sometimes products will be a very tight connection and in each case we'll try to give it uh some Focus I guess the best way to say it is that it really is experimental in every case we'll throw some advertising at it see how well it does it does well we'll throw some more advertising at it but I don't know that I have a very I don't know that I have a very set structure of how I work with those bundles also there's something else bundles typically introduced um as a way to increase sales of something that's already doing well so there is already a Baseline and you want to be careful not to hurt your existing sales by conf by confusing the customers that's that's exactly correct especially if you have repeated sales as part of your business like like we just mentioned shampoos people buy them on an ongoing basis month to month and you want to make sure that they that you're easy to find interesting right and what I'm thinking of is a case where if you have a shampoo and conditioner and the shampoo and conditioner is double the price of the shampoo if you advertise that shampoo and conditioner aggressively all of a sudden the top spot for a search is taken up by a skew that costs double any of the other list in that are there yeah you're hurting your shampoo listing the shampoo listing on its own is very competitive in cells but by being aggressive with that bundle you've hurt your initial sale use sales so you know that's just a clear example but I'm sure there's a lot of other ways it can play out where the idea is sounds good on the face of it of of sell of upselling but uh it might have unintended consequences that's that's very interesting um also like for example we know that when we try to advertise bundles versus individual products we just try to separate that and have like U you know individual products uh that are oriented towards profitability and everything we can do for them to harvest even more you know sales at are affordable a cost and at the same time when we advertise for bundles it's like take that growth approach in a separate budget just for that and analyze the um the the the performance individually for each one of those but we haven't had so far that explicit situation where something is affected that much so that we were able to isolate that this was the reason why it happen what's your experience I don't think I don't I don't think Amazon ever wants to tell you exactly why something happens once the more you know about Amazon the easier it is to uh manipulate things to your advantage and all although both of us are working with h the genuine interest of of our clients you know as you can imagine there are all sorts of sellers that would use things in ways that Amazon doesn't intend or want so they'll always have a layer of mystery in there uh typically what we do is we try to focus on the core of getting sales we want the basic ad types the base ad structures should get you the bulk of your business once you have that bulk of business coming in you can experiment with all sorts of things all day long and um that's what we do you know we'll start off with the core campaign types like I told you and as we learn more we add little bits here and there we'll start with uh things like related uh campaigns and the cross advertising and little bit by little bit that'll add an incremental volume to the business I see that's that's um that's a very healthy approach just start with the pretty basic stuff and then build up test out whatever works interesting it's it's what worked for us so far cool um we also uh discussed that you were recently on a very familiar event can you tell us a little bit more about hgtg and um how when was the first time you uh were on the event and this year how was this year for you sure so um the event we're talking about is called asgt G I don't actually know what asgtg stands for but um it's not so important because it has its own reputation in the world of sellers by this point does um asgtg is a group that was started by a man named ed Rosenberg and uh he didn't you know he wanted to create a community for sellers that uh we could exchange information and ask questions and be able to get good feedback um and he used a platform called telegram it's a little bit different than Facebook it's a little bit different than WhatsApp it's uh there are a few unique features about it and um one of the things that he's been able to do is to create a group of groups so everything is Under the Umbrella of asgtg but depending on whatever your focus is there are separate groups for it so there are groups for advertising there are groups for people that sell on Walmart there are people for groups for people who need help with sourcing there are groups for people who are new there are groups for people who are Advanced and there are probably six times more groups than what I just mentioned um and depending on what you do there are people you know there are groups specific to countries and marketplaces there's Amazon Japan and Amazon Israel and Amazon UK and people will get into those to discuss issues specific to those is you know to those topics in those groups so it's wide and it's vibrant and there's a lot going on there um to support those groups um he real realized that there's even in the there's also something lacking um he felt that uh the agendas at a lot of these connections at a lot of these um events weren't so focused on what sellers really needed and uh in a lot of cases the necking was not so great because they might have a very very wide range of people that are not in tune with each other so he started the asgtg event and um it's held in Brooklyn New York which is one of the top Market you know one of the top locations for Amazon sellers in the United States um I think 3% of all sellers over a million dollars are located there and 7% of all sellers are located in is both are amazing amazing stats um so he held the event in Brooklyn it's been going on for either four or five years now um I missed the first event it was not on my radar yet the second year I started to hear about it a couple of friends said it's going to be interesting I went and um I sat in on all of the sessions all of the events uh all of the confer you know the little uh conferences and um it was very very interesting there was a lot of data there was a lot of information and I basically was in that big conference room for the entire day um the second year I realized that that uh I had been seeing a lot of people I know so what ended up happening was I spent a little bit less time in the actual sessions and a little bit more time in the networking areas and I saw people I knew I saw people I hadn't seen in years I saw people that I only knew from social media and that added a whole new dimension to the value of the event for me um seeing people that you don't see anywhere except in social media you're able to have conversations you'll never have otherwise things that uh things that go over people's heads in a text message will go over much better when you're speaking to them and there's a much better flow of conversation I mean that's just the way people work so the second year was a completely different event for me you know with the additional aspect of networking built in I enjoyed it much more than the first year and this year which was just last week uh was again even more of a shift towards networking um I hate to admit it but I probably missed half of the sessions um not that I couldn't have gotten anything from them and I was actually a little bit upset that I missed one specific event or one specific uh talk but um the ability to speak to again people that I know and people that wanted to speak to me and people that uh had I had had an introduction with a couple of weeks ago but we said let's talk at the event it's it's priceless um as an example I I met somebody that I had done a little bit of Consulting for a year ago and uh we didn't speak much since then even though the convers you know even though the work went well we didn't speak much in that year past we sat down here we just happened to be sitting next to each other with plates of food and we spent 40 minutes talking and uh you know I showed him different things he could tweak in his business issues that he had had for a while that he really couldn't discuss with anyone else he said listen I have this issue and um since you've been inside my business what do you think about this I said listen I know how you R I know how you run your business because I've been in there and you have this issue that prevents you from fixing it change this a little bit I said wow I didn't think of that and that right away become became productive for him and I was able to give him a little bit of value and as a consultant the idea is that if I give him an others and value it's going to come back to me in that big circle of how the world works that is correct exactly um out of the presentations you were able to attend um can you tell us a little bit more what the content of the event is generally so EDS content and the asgtg content is generally a little bit higher level than you'll hear at other shows um there was someone speaking about driving off Amazon traffic over to your Amazon listings and they were talking about very unique things that you w't hear anywhere else things like uh writing press releases and uh other you know other very unexpected ideas and tasks and uh you know in incentives that you can give to bring people over to your listings not just run a Facebook ad or give money to an influencer this was a little bit more targeted and things you wouldn't hear otherwise so that was a man named Norman Ferrar he's actually got a beard larger than surprised I wasn't able to get a picture with him for comp but uh everybody came to me and said hey there's somebody there with a beard bigger than yours so uh that was one of the uh that was one of the presentations um another one was by a man named beer Cohen he is very very smart uh for whatever we've been discussing about PPC he's like four levels above us in terms of sophistication and he was talking both the advertising and also about social media presence and traffic that also was something that was useful uh there were a couple of other presenters as well they had someone that was there from Amazon giving a talk which is something you don't see at any other conference yeah nobody gets actual Amazon employees to speak he had an Amazon employee that was there for a Q&A session where people were able to submit questions and get those questions answered again something you won't see anywhere else and then they gave a specific talk about you know seller health and about things that we can do to improve our performance uh things you won't hear anywhere uh for me personally though the best event of the day was um a man named Joe and I don't know how to pronounce his last name there are uh I keep trying to to pronounce it and I won't even uh attempted for the podcast but he's the man who runs a website called Marketplace pulse and um his basically his his publication and his Marketplace pulse is dedicated to keeping tabs on Amazon and how the platform is evolving over time as well as even the other marketplaces that exist and he gave a talk on the year that just passed for Amazon and for other platforms that for me was the most fascinating Talk of the day of the week of the month he was talking about how Amazon compares to wish and Alibaba and to other platforms all around the world he was talking about how the makeup of sellers are on Amazon how many sellers are small how many sellers are large how many sellers are inactive you know for example if there are 8 million sellers in Amazon in reality 5 million are inactive they just open accounts and never do sell a single unit and he actually broke that down for us he broke down who Amazon's top competitors are who they are currently who's coming up who he thinks has potential and some of the insights were very very interesting um his thoughts on Walmart his thoughts on Google shopping uh that that for me was the best session of the day by far and I've heard him speak at other conferences also everything he puts out his topnotch it really puts the world of Amazon into a different perspective without necessarily talking about do this or do this or do this it's nice to have a top level view of what's Happening um did he say anything specifically about new and upcoming platforms like for example we know that Walmart just recently rolled out their own PPC platform which is right now pretty rudimentary but I'm guessing it will evolve did he mention anything like more specific around that so he didn't talk about the Walmart advertising platform specifically but both Walmart and Google shopping were the ones that he singled out for the most potential growth in relation to Amazon he said those are the two platforms that are putting the most into competing with Amazon they have the both the best starting points and those are the ones which are going to uh give Amazon the most trouble over time and probably although he didn't say it the reasons are pretty clear you know Google on one hand has top of funnel searches that Amazon doesn't have you know Amazon searches are very much focused on people that want to buy yeah and which is very good that's great for that's great in a 100 ways you know you know that your products are being put in front of people who want to buy but Google has the top level search so when people don't know what vacuum cleaner they want a lot of times they'll go to Google for websites about reviews or other things they do have a lot of traffic and uh they have access to a completely different base of possible Shoppers than Amazon does and if they can capitalize on that they'll be able to do a lot I mean it's no secret Amazon is one of the top advertisers on Google themselves so yeah you know Amazon knows the value of that traffic themselves and if Google can capitalize on it you know they have a they have access to a lot of Shoppers there's also an interesting thing where if Google starts to um maybe penalize Amazon or not be so happy with giving them the best ad placements you know that could be something which sets up a very big competition between the two um so that's Google they have their own spot it's a very unique spot they can take on Amazon without having to do exactly what Amazon does uh the other big compe is of course Walmart and with Walmart their their um Advantage is there also in that they have their regular retail Network which is as large as any in the world if not larger so they have people that know the Walmart name they have people that instinctively go to the app when they want to buy something locally and they have a base from which to build sales from which no comp no other competitor does they don't have to spend the same to advertise and bring people to Walmart they're there already I can tell you now that in a lot of cases uh if I have to shop at the Walmart near me I'll go to the app and I will look for whatever options are there and I'll use that app to find out where in the store it is because they'll tell you I don't have to run around looking for a popcorn popper I know it's an iio 16 because the app told me so you know I have it gives me direction it keeps me connected to Walmart and I'll also see if the if the you know if the thing I really want doesn't happen to be in the store it's easy enough to make the purchase right from the app in that situation so they also have a unique angle on shoppers that Amazon doesn't have and that is an angle which is big enough to take significant market share but this is also pretty good news for sellers especially you know whoever owns private label Brands like you can use Google for top of the funnel searches and get Harvest at top of the finnal traffic you can use Amazon for purchases that are already for people who are ready to purchase and you can also uh list on Walmart for people who are more oriented towards you know being loyal customers but at the same time this uh offline presence is very strong with wmart I think it's also one of their main advantages oh yeah that's definitely true um one of the things that nice about Walmart is that they're still very selective in who they allow to sell so just the fact that you can get onto Walmart gives you better exposure and you'll actually be able to put up a pretty nice proportion of sales compared to Amazon you know the proportion of sales you get is far out of out of relation to Amazon's versus Walmart's overall e-commerce sites yeah I haven't thought of that but actually it means less competition and higher conversion rates on Walmart right right yeah that's that's the idea yeah I was just speaking with um with someone who's very experienced in Walmart I mean as experienced as you can be and they've been they've been working with Walmart as a partner for advertising and they're saying that um the the conversion rates are very very high with the advertising so having access to those Shoppers could be very useful and do you know maybe what are the main parameters that someone should um what are the main conditions someone should meet in order to list on Walmart um the truth is I'm not sure applications to Walmart are not part of my regular business offerings so I haven't had to worry so much about the people getting approved or getting people approved in general it's they want somebody who's going to add to the platform if you have a pair of bluetooth headphones that are literally exactly the same like every other Bluetooth headphone on Amazon you're probably not going to get approved as an account if you have an established brand or you have a unique offering or you have sales in other places like you've got some retail distribution then you'll be likely to get an Amazon uh a Walmart approval mhm okay um it does um sound like something worth looking in too because it's a new and upand cominging platform online for selling online so whoever wants to expand their presence and maximize sales should think should have a multi-platform approach definitely so Walmart is one of their first things to discover agreed yeah that I would definitely agree with okay um interesting insights you have shared with us today is there anything else you'd like to say to our audiences oh Bo I wasn't ready for this question um the only thing I can say is uh don't get discouraged after a week uh that's a lot of times people will you know I hear from a lot of people that say I've been advertising for a week I spent $100 and I'm not selling take a little bit more time and see how things go and uh try to make some adjustments that's some good advice um I mean you know Amazon spoils people like if they try to achieve anything on Google they would know what the long-term mindset actually is like whatever you're trying to achieve on Google it would take between anywhere between 12 and 18 months and on Amazon it's like three to four months you're already achieving something and you know they they can't afford even that's time less which is why many of them yeah I I would definitely say it's true I have friends that uh are managing Google advertising and they won't even take a client unless they are ready to make a six-month plus commitment there's simply nothing you can nothing you can achieve within the 30 60 990 days and that you can measure by and Amazon is but if you haven't figured that within 90 days at least the general direction of where you're going it's probably not going to work you know but you should know by that Google you won't yeah that's definitely true that's 100% true um thank you AE for being our guest today and it was very pleas really nice to have you we are hoping to hear from you again uh soon definitely I'm always happy to uh help you help your audience and uh if you have any questions you know definitely reach out to me I'm happy to help yes I'll leave in the video description I will leave a link uh to to Abes um agency website as well as asgtg link for anyone who wants to join their telegram messaging platform so yes all right I appr appreciate it thank you