Amazon PPC Product Launch Strategy with Steven Pope

hi guys and welcome to another episode on Amazonia PPC channel for today's episode we have a really special guest Stephen pope from my Amazon guy you all know him so uh welcome Stephen you a brief intro if there's anybody who doesn't know you uh yeah so we manage $1.2 billion doll in annual revenue on Amazon basically one out of every 200 transactions in the US market uh over 400 Brands uh we're the largest independently owned Amazon agency in the world um but I don't think anybody cares about those stats they just care what PBC hacks I have today and so that's where I'm going to really hang my hat Since I no longer have any hair I have to wear a hat on occasion yeah and you're you're you're you're GNA be not too far away from where I am today yeah I'm it's from all those from all those Seller Support tickets we've had to file right must be that must be that okay for this episode I thought that we can um maybe talk about product launches that's a Everlasting um subject so I know how I do it do it but I'm really interested to see your perspective on it and share with our audience how you do it um for me there are two interesting points to that so the very first product launch for a first product without any uh brand out there nobody knows it and then the second part would be if you can share how you would do it for already established brand so I don't know let's say product let's dive in okay so most of the PBC uh answers are conditional based on setting so we have to make some assumptions to answer these questions so the first assumption I'm going to make is when somebody's first launching their first product that their budget is going to be constrained usually a firsttime Amazon FBA seller they're side hustling this is a pipe dream they they're still working full-time and they're they're trying to get something off the ground and for those people typically their budget is going to be $10,000 all in right that's going to include cogs that's going to include Logistics and and often a very heavy chunk of that 10K is eaten before we get to PPC and that's that's like mistake number one I think new product launch sellers run into is that they blow their entire budget before they have any advertising off the ground um so you know we're going to be looking at week one $22,000 probably best case scer like best case scener absolutely best yeah yeah and for most sellers probably more like $2,000 for the full first month or two right they have to really make it make it pull um so a minimum order quantity from for a typical you know starter product is is a th000 units but some people are getting away with 200 to 500 um so so now with those assumptions in place what would I do with those constraints first thing I would do is I would set up a bunch of different campaign types uh and I would put 80% of my budget behind two campaign types specifically Auto campaigns and Broad match this is going to be something that's going to set me apart from most PPC supposed experts in the space because a lot of them want to dive in a heavy proportion of their budget into exact match really early on and and I'm only leaving 20% for that so 80% of the budgets day one broad match and auto campaigns there's a very heavy reason why I do this so I launched a mom box uh three years ago um and it was you know basically 30 days before Mother's Day in the United States and I was able to sell $144,000 wow in 30 days and of that $111,000 was spent on PPC so I spent 11k month one on a product launch generated 144k now what's going to surprise most people is that I spent $8,000 of that 11k specifically on Broad match and the and it was one single keyword broad match gifts for Mom now I obviously I had the seasonality and you know the fact that it spikes like a million impressions going into Mother's Day and there's a lot of reasons why I did it the way I did it and this is easily replicatable but the the basic fact is this I was able to get my product to organic rank number one for the term gifts for mom 48 hours before Mother's Day and that's amane yeah sorry the way I see it the the important takeaway is here is not it's not like this is how you do product launch anytime throughout the year you really took the context into into the the the equation like hey it's the seasonality and I want to launch my giftable product so it's it's going to be different if if you did that in middle June so I suppose that you waited for the specific time to launch a product not like you you were not eager like hey I want to launch it in may even though it's only it's a giftable product right so I'd like to take credit for the fact that this was an intentional choice on my end but but in reality me like most Amazon sellers we're just scrambling and they're like holy I barely have time to get this up in time for the on that was the reality right and I think most sellers can relate to that um having said that I do have strong beliefs that launching a product right before a seasonal Rush is a great idea and and so like a November one launch of any item is generally a favorable time frame to launch because you get that Q4 bump Black Friday bump and and there's just a lot a lot of benefits um and PBC costs actually go down conversion goes up during that time period And so there's just a lot of things that that go well so the Mother's Day rush which was actually smaller for gifts from Mom than the Christmas rush um was the second best time to launch this product and I barely got it up in time so when when I first launched it uh you know it was it was T minus 30 days and I I launch day one and I get like one sale and I'm like oh crap what's what's going to happen and I I'm like it's got to be the main image and I spend some time fixing the main image and and not a lot of people talk about main images when it comes to PBC strategies but I just want to touch on this for a brief moment because when you're launching a product there is nothing more important than the main image of your product so when you have that remaining $2,000 that you have left over for your product launch I would put a solid 200 of that not in PBC and into fixing your main image like run a Pik Fu test hire some designer to like you know give you multiple options and and run some tests and that will make your PVC go so much farther um I agree 100% yeah but one of the other things that I think uh a lot of people don't talk enough about is pricing during launches so so click to rate we've established incredibly important worthy of a product PBC launch conversation and pricing is as well um I launch products at 50% off until I have 50 units in sales and then I have a strategy um and I've got the full like step-by-step strategy at my Amazon gy.com price but we we basically level step it you know five or 10 points at a time every 20 to 50 units and orders as we're trying to progress the the product launch and if you do this your PBC will be three times more effective what happens when you're three times more effective with PPC well you're actually net positive on your marketing budget and your PPC goes farther so I also want to mention that as a key component of of a PBC launch strategy but in terms of the PBC components um a lot of people will start with an autoc campaign and then they'll negate the good keywords from the auto and and promote it over to exact match and I I really want to indict that I think that's a terrible strategy um and I think that if a keyword is working in an auto campaign leave it the hell alone right like say those are PPC Ms out there yeah you can name 10 of them one of them is that negating everything in AO uh since you mentioned that negating can you uh give us a little bit more context on how you structure that broad campaign with the gifts from Mom keyword broad match I suppose you had a bunch of negatives out there or you just let it go yeah yeah tons yeah so the the key to a great broad or an auto Campaign which costs less than an exact match campaign is the negations and this is where I think a lot of the PBC Community is Led astray in in negation strategy I I I think that they negate the opposite of of of the actual thing they should negate so so I think a lot of old school PBC courses taught you negate good keywords and then you segment them out and and I'm Pro segmentation let's clear but I think you know I think there's a misunderstanding of of why you segment or how you segment and cannibalization and I'd love to dive into that uh but primarily on on an auto and Broad match campaign any keyword that's converting leave it alone and then things that don't work let's say I'm selling this metal tumbler here and the keyword like wine glass or the keyword plastic showed up and it's a steel tumbler chances of that working for a steel tumbler is extraordinarily low that's going to make sense to negate but if but if I was following the PBC advice of you know 2015 from the typical standard PBC course if I got the you know the the steel Tumblr keyword to convert on an auto it would teach to negate it there and then put it into an exact match campaign the problem with that in 2024 and it probably was valid back in 2015 quite frankly but like but like the problem with that in 2024 is that PBC costs are higher on exact match bidding because everybody has been taught to build these exact match campaigns and are ignoring the auto and the broad and therefore the cost to obtain that impression is actually lower on the auto and the broad and Amazon seems to be rewarding it uh disproportionately they're pushing it more and more why well you can look at there there's there's the way that they changed the settings uh of exact match came there's no such thing as exact match anymore EXA match right so yeah that's a good name name for it yeah they're clearly they're clearly pushing you towards the the looser Targets on purpose so you might as well Embrace that and then build the broad campaign and then negate all the things that you know Amazon's going to put serously in there that don't make sense right thank you very much for that yeah uh good negation is key H and it's always been like that I like to Drew draw parallel between Google ad because I've been doing that for for a few years before we jumped into the Amazon space and um yeah negatives even in in Google are crucial especially for um there in Google ads there's a thing called quality score and I really like the Google ads and and thank them for for that I think eventually we'll see something like that in Amazon to too so they take into consideration while calculating qual score course is a if I remember correctly that's a landing page experience is crucial here would be like a product listing is it optimized or not then they have click through rate and add relevancy so how relevant is your ad do you use headlines with h with keywords they are related to the product and images and everything so I think in the future we're going to see something like that so that's where negation also comes in place you want don't want to show up as you said for glass U cups when it's a steel one for the because of the relevancy um okay and what about um how that compares for an already established brand and a launch of a new product so I think there's a lot of crossover in the strategies the biggest difference here is going to be budget and the ability to go deeper or broader maybe both on on some of these campaign structures so I you know I I think when you're a new time firsttime seller there's so many things that are confusing and there's just so much road rash to obtain there's a lot of taxes you have to pay um and I'm not talking about fat or Actual taxes I'm talking about like mistake taxes and and so when you're first starting out having um an auto campaign is really easy to set up having a broad match campaign is really easy to set up just hard to manage because you go back and AD negations but if if we look at the fact that when I did that first time product launch I spent $8,000 on a single keyword on a broad match it made it very easy for me to manage that campaign and it was highly effective and I had good outcomes so so I think when we look at a more sophisticated um brand or its product launch we're going to see a lot more of diversification on the campaign setup we're going to probably see a much deeper keyword selection there's going to be a master keyword list built uh and and you know a new time seller will be like what's that you know and and an oldtime seller would be like well that's you know just the most critical thing you need ever to set up your listing and we call it an mkl and and so I think I think somebody like that will have probably 50 to 150 keywords that they're going to hit day one whereas a a new product new brand will be hitting like five or less and there's nothing wrong with either of these strategies it's a budget question because if you know you're going to put $8,000 on the keyword gifts for mom you don't need to set up 17 campaigns but with an established product you want to go deeper and broader and so here's a few ways you could do that and also one mistake to avoid you're going to make lots of different campaigns you're going to probably have exact match campaign set up day one because you're going to have that Master keyword list but one of the mistakes that I see is that sometimes people will build a campaign with too many keywords in it and this is what causes keyword cannibalization so you can so so fun fact you can have the same keyword on multiple campaigns that's not cannibalizing your bids but if you have 50 keywords on the same campaign what happens 80% of your impressions go to Five keywords therefore those five keywords are cannibalizing the other 45 and so those 45 keywords could have been really good for you had they been segmented out one way you could do this to segment them out is to have groupings of related keywords so you might have five keywords related to gifts using the same gift bomb mombox strategy and then another five keywords could be about the lotion and the raspberry scent gift or or one of the individual products and segmented out that way because it's a mom box there's lots of different things in it and another one could be about um a totally different strategy U and maybe it's it's all you know scent related or it's all um you know the the fact that it's an age related campaign with five different you know gifts for age 50 to 55 or something like that and and by doing this those keywords won't cannibalize each other and they'll have more room to breathe and we could throw in some other you know Common belief sets like don't mix bro and Auto or a broaden uh phrase and exact match all in the same campaign I'm a little looser on that I mean generally speaking I try not to mix them but I you know if I accidentally do it I'll probably leave it alone um and I also don't don't touch it right yeah yeah once something is working don't screw it up right like the the the money you've spent to get a a working campaign leave it alone right don't go back and negate the good keyword on the auto and the broad I I'll say that three times on this podcast because feel so firm about it it's like an investment investment in the algorithm historical data so if you cancel that you canel the investment and you start over one of the questions I I'll get every few months is like hey my PBC is a mass should I start over and I'll be like no don't don't start over yeah either hire the PBC expert to come clean it up or you have to just start making new campaigns but don't turn off the old ones unless unless that there's not a single campaign that's working and in that case I would be like okay maybe start over but generally speaking everybody has at least some good campaigns uh so so segmentation you know even so let's let's say I'm taking over a campaign that somebody had put 200 keywords in the same campaign and and by the way if you looked at how I would have done this eight years ago I would have done that by the way why because eight years ago that worked but about but about five years ago the algo shifted and then and then keyword cannibalization started happening and um you you might even be able to retrace some of my some of my videos where I started talking about like what what the heck is happening it was like June of 2019 I think uh and and I was like wow all of my past campaign started you know my setup started sucking and I don't know what's going on and and then I realized you know sometime later that it was because the keywords were getting cannibalized now because there's you can't spray and prey you can't shotgun it anymore right so you have to to be more sophisticated in the segmentation and and five keyword cap is a general good loose best rule I would suggest for most people okay and for U this scenario for established brand how would you go and this decide how aggressive you would like to be and how high you would go with with bidding if for example if we take an exact match for the keywords that you want to rank for how do you decide how aggressive you want to go and for example if a client has um goal to reach top five is there anything that you can share about that so I I think slot three in PPC is probably the most ideal location uh to be for optimal a cost results uh I think position one is overpaying and I think position two is just slightly overpaying but position three seems to be a a really good place to be um so sometimes you can make a qualified guess based on the data like what it's going to cost to be in position one and then make an educated guess okay what's it going to cost to be in position three place your bid and see what happens um but this is this is a budget question that will depend on how aggressive you want to go now if we're selling a supplement then we know by default our bids are going to be3 to5 Dollar a piece uh that we're going to be upside down for the first 90 days minimum sometimes even as long as a year and we're going for a lifetime order value repeat customers subscribe and save yada yada and and thousands of sellers pick supplements because it's really freaking easy to source and it's easy to launch and The Branding and all that stuff doesn't really have much of an impact so that's that's why there's so many supplement Brands and it's a high margin product generally speaking but when you first launch the PBC is exorbitant and very difficult and and for an average product launch at HomeGoods you might need less than $10,000 to be you know comfortably successful in supplements you might need more like 20,000 with 10,000 just dedicated on the PVC that to be comfortable so that would be like structurally speaking how how I would think about uh some of that but there's also other campaign types I I think I think sponsored brands on a on a on a brand that's more known make a lot more sense it's higher up in the funnel and um and I think that people who invest in video um are going to have a huge Advantage because you know people are lazy uh sellers are lazy they they don't make good videos or they don't even show up and make video at all and there's just way less competition to load a video to Amazon and get clicks and sometimes I'll see an exact match bid U for sponsored products be three or five doll but for video be like 80 cents because there's no competition right that's that's a head turner that's like wow you could structurally speaking make your PBC budget go four or five times farther um yes it does cost a few hundred dos maybe a couple thousand to build your video out um but but like at my Amazon guy I have you know eight video editors on staff to make video content we've really made an investment here and we see it pay big dividends um and so I highly recommend um video we see Tik Tok you know really shooting up if you have a Tik Tock product and don't have videos I think you're crazy right like if you're you're selling a clothing fashion item and you don't have a Tik Tock video like what are you smoking if there are hundreds of influencers out there Hawking your competitor's products you have a Tik Tock product you have a video type product you could also even look at it from like an old school like 1990s View and be like you got a billy May product you got a sham W product you got a a product that you you can you know wax on wax off and show and tell it and and as seen on TV so so for those those people I think people are sleeping on video ads um Amazon TV is now sponsoring video content as well I mean if you know if they give us the ability to Target a specific show let's say you're selling Lord of the Rings memorabilia and you can hit the new Lord of the Rings uh you know rings of power series um we won't won't mention how boring that episode was but you know the fact is is that like you could you could make your videos show up in this content and just get exuberant awesome orders and stuff like that so I think I think video content's a big thing people are sleeping on we have the influencers program inside of of of Seller Central for select sellers at this point it's been in beta for way too long yeah it's like two years or something um but we're seeing it roll out more and more and those are those are just opportunities for everybody yeah I like the word that you said tick talkable tick talkable product that that should be branded yeah um what do you think about the fact would you ever include any type of sponsor brand ads during the product launch yes so I I would uh but only for established Brands not the new product launch right um and so this is going to be category dependent uh certain certain categories this will work better than others but if if you have three products and you're launching the new product having it show up to other high review products in that sponsored brand because sometimes the headline ad show reviews can be very beneficial by association this product it's part of the established brand I can trust it Etc um so I think I think those are are good opportunities yeah the reason I ask is sorry to interrupt reason I ask because people are keep keep saying like hey sponsor product type of ad is what influences the rank and you don't waste your money on sponsor brand so that's the context why I ask so yeah it's not only about ranking it's about uh exposure and promotion and sales velocity too can you enable screen share real quick I want to showcase something because I'm looking at a brand headline ad right now that's got video in it and and we're going to see more more of that so I'm going to show up the the screen share here for those that are are watching the video um so I just typed in like Artisan soap I even mispelled it um and and I'm actually triggering knives for some reason cleaning knives I think or brushes I'm not this point um so that brings up another Point like if you if somebody can't understand what they're looking at in three seconds your PBC costs are going to be higher than the average Joe so just you know caution on that add adding a keyword like cleaner brush would have solved this problem because even watching the video I was like is that a knife it's not yeah I thought it's a knife yeah yeah so so would I would I build a sponsor brand headline ad with a video with an unclear product and hit the wrong keywords no I wouldn't do something like that why would anybody type in Artisan soap and buy that product they wouldn't but when when we look at like what other people are looking for and we can see the sponsored products and yes I agree with you the data does semi- indicate sponsored brand it's pretty weak on SEO influence but which that doesn't make sense like I don't understand why Amazon wouldn't weight it better um but but sponsor product does seem to be you know where it's at right but but in the search term we've got two video ads triggered so far from two different partners um one video was B this B video is a little bit weaker um but I I I think that sponsor Brands which includes video ads is incredibly uh helpful and important uh to do and sometimes when we scroll down enough we'll see a third video ad um and it's actually the same ad twice um and so if you see the same ad twice and this one even has a two star review average ironically um that chances are the bid to get that video ad up is pretty reasonable so we saw that the top ad was triggered for an unrelated product which means they're hitting this by a broad match uh and so if we had an artisan soap um video ad we would be getting probably less than 75 cent cicks on this exact term just guessing right just just just by what we see here the comp sense so so we we've established the video is good sponsor Brands good display you know once you get into to like that 30,000 a month budget that's when I start looking at display um I I I have had oneoff unicorn campaigns in display that do very very well um but they're typically like just unicorn campaigns I can't replicate the other products so one time I was selling a wine glass U I'm not drinking alone I'm social distancing and then I hit the category term wine glass with a display ad and had 45 Cent clicks three years AO go which you know was less than 50% of the normal bids so there's a lot of opportunity for that but if you look at the search results and we counted up like how many ads there are so depending on how you want to calculate this ad you could count this as one or you could count it as three because there's three products you know there's three or whatever there's another plus four from that row there then we get like two rows of organic or not even two rows just five products of organic followed by another ad then we scroll down four more ads so the reason why I like showcasing this there's another two ads there it's there's more than 50% ads now taking up the organic page one and even if you get that 50% 80% of the above the fold is an ad when you load the page so the question of you know how important is PBC is self-evident most people listening to this podcast obviously already buy into it otherwise they wouldn't be listening to a PBC pun podcast but the fact of the matter is once you understand just what search looks like that answers a couple of other questions that sometimes people ask such as if I you know if I'm organic rank one do I need to spend money on PPC and the answer to that is most definitely yes why I was organic re ranked number one for the term wine glass for two years and my ads got banned because one day Amazon woke up and said screw you Stephen Pope no not really but probably somebody there didn't like me I don't know who knows somebody I mean like people listening to this podcast feel that way sometimes like they they they they think they're getting targeted they they might be sometimes they are I I've seen some pretty you know fishy stuff in my days but but anyway so Amazon one day banned the word drinking from ads and my wine glass had the term drinking on it and so I was organic number one for the term wine glass within three days I was in slot 44 and I never recovered I've seen death yeah without ads you cannot be in the top five organic positions in 90% of the categories so you do have to have ads to be organically ranked and if you are organically ranked and you have a PBC ad congratulations now you have twice as many clicks and and that's not a waste and it's very important so establish Brands yes even if you're organically ranked with one product should you advertise the other 100% yes nice thank you very much to wrap it up one final question um since you mentioned and proven how important it is to have uh ads what would you say is the perfect ratio between ads ad sales and organic sales well the the perfect ratio would be 0% ads and 100% organic but of course that's not possible um 10 years ago I had two cent PBC clicks for position one when I was selling rice cookers for a company called NIS bits you know owned by the British uh but that's just not possible anymore and so realistically speaking in 2024 um some ratio between 4060 50/50 or 6040 is pretty realistic for most brands in 2024 um and and so having an AC cost that you can manage that margin with that sort of heavy PBC driven sales is incredibly important um but but even if uh you know 60% of your product sales are driven by ads you're still beating the fact that like you know the search results are driving 80% of the clicks to ads today um and and so you're actually beating the average if you think about it like beating the consumer at the click level so if you do some of the things we talked about on the podcast today you get your main image right you price it right when you're first launching and and you structurally don't over bid on exact match and you rely upon Auto and Broad your budget's going to go a lot farther other Advanced Techniques we didn't even get to day parting and and other more sophisticated strategies that may or may not make sense um but at the end of the day uh I think I think Brands uh have to spend time focus on PPC they have to they have to put a sizable budget behind it and and a tacos of you know somewhere between 11 and 15% um is pretty standard these days in my opinion yeah I agree with that I'm I'm seeing in a range of 15 to to 25 uh is is on average what I see uh in our cans depending on the context depending on the category yeah yeah of the 1.1 billion that that we or 1.2 billion that we run at my Amazon guy we're we're averaging a 9% tacos all in um but that takes into account some you know well established brands that have Omni Channel approach and stuff like that a digital native brand that's just starting out year one wouldn't be unheard of to be in that 25% tacos range um but year two I would hope you know closer to 15 if possible right okay uh give us just a short info if somebody wants to contact you what's the best place for that so so I hang out on LinkedIn every day if you DM me I'll I'll I'll personally read it and respond most likely um and YouTube you know I I've put out 2200 videos of content um you know probably 100 on PBC alone uh if you want to hear some other PBC tips that I teach my own team um and I have about 60 people people that that do PBC fulltime at mag go to my amazong guy.com PBC we'll give at you some more free tips and you guys can check it out so thanks for having me on iore I appreciate it it was a pleasure Stephen byebye thank you