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

hi everyone this is Jelena from Amazonia PPC and today I have a very special guest with me mr. ape tamale who has his own agency today we're going to talk about multiple strategies some of the mandatory parts of the strategy he uses for his account management as well as most recent events that happened in New York last week both is GDG went in welcome and thank you for being here today well thank you for having me I'm happy to give some of my time to help you with your audience a little bit we're happy to have you and tell us a little bit more about yourself you have a very rich experience in generally speaking and 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 I've actually been selling since 1991 I've been around for a while even before there was an Internet I was selling electronics and we were advertising in the back of different magazines so we take a half page in 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 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 have a rebuild step for a product page it's sort of like what Amazon is doing now for sellers Yahoo stores went for few years and then we migrated to having our own website we did that for close to another decade until Amazon came along and started taking all the business you know from everywhere else and for the past decade I was selling on Amazon two years ago a couple of people that I do into me and asked me for help with their accounts specifically with their advertisers and as I started to help them I said you know this is a good the work and I'm actually enjoying it maybe I'll take over your accounts for you they were very happy to have me do that and I was excited to see that the experience I had in electronics translated very well to other product categories and I started to say to myself maybe this is an interesting way to use my experience in a way that's more creative than just working on the 2018 model of the digital camera instead of the 2017 or 2016 model and 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 a year into consulting full-time I've got about three dozen clients across almost all of the categories in Amazon and it's been very interesting seeing a lot about what happens on Amazon from a lot of different viewpoints our sellers yes it's always very exciting I can understand your point of view is we also run a consulting business and there are many many different angles and business strategies that people use that you have access to that you can you know apply it 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 yeah 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 I run the PPC campaigns I created PPC campaigns you know there are of course as many different types of advertising and Amazon that go into the display advertising and retargeting so I work with all of those types of advertising for sellers and although that the main focus it does connect to other services as well so I helped clients win those things I can create those things or fix listings I can help them optimize their listings by doing the competitive research on their products against the against the environment that's on Amazon I also do general consultant 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 well you know I've had lawsuits that I've had to file and I've been targeted forces so nothing almost nothing a client tells me will be something that I haven't heard of before and clients who want that help so it turns into actual consultant so I can help people strategize and put issues into perspective and find both short term and long term planning for their business models 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 and advertising so it's really as the pricing plus yeah the best way to describe the model is advertising cost and it is the most appropriate version of advertising services 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 effect you can see results so you have to like dabble in product there's the optimisation and copywriting and you know imagery design and stuff like that that does help conversion rates rise overall but it also helps you know PPC when when you actually look at it so I'm definitely understand of course what are the first yeah I mean one of the first things we do whenever a client or 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 foot to the day took with their phone they're not gonna sell no matter what we spend on advertise so and those are that's happened in some cases you know we'll add a full image set or will add EBC to account that is mysteriously branded you know they took the time and the effort to register their brand but never did any of the next steps that with the tools that are available for them so I'll tell them you've got brand registry you're eligible for all different extra programs you need to start working with those programs and it will all tie it together exactly like you know when the when ecommerce business starts to grow there are so many things to deal with and outsourcing could 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 there are more successful they're 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 usually they'll find partnership with marketing very helpful okay so before this call we discussed some topics that we wanted to cover and I had a suggestion that you might share some of the strategies and some of the core basics of what you will cover in 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 SKU that they're advertising in a separate part of group 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 did 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 run the way that Amazon gives us that data is with the search term report and they'll typically tell us a term or an ASA or you know something you know whatever the data point might be those fellows performance is in a group and if we have more than one product in the group we can't tell what the data is telling us about so I was giving 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 the other hand if your style might have a lot of orange in it even though it's considered a blue 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 SKU 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 as hundreds or thousands of products in it and you want to run a catch-all campaign that just gives coverage to everything you sell don't put all of the product 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 sort of a mistake that I see a lot of sellers make and something to be cautious up a little bit extra work to give every single SKU but it's important the second thing is the as far as how to set up and have them 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 set up that we use the first thing is that the will typically give campaigns over to one product so if a seller has three different products that they have a blanket and a towel and the t-shirt we typically won't put those items together for advertising purposes each one will get their own campaigns but in addition to that for each product that we're advertising so for that towel we'll start off with four campaigns most commonly lose art up with an auto campaign we'll start off with campaign for each of the three match types for broad phrase and exact and by doing that it lets us tailor the advertising campaigns the advertising budgets to spend you know over to each type we found that 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 let's start off with those we'll start off with those form and we'll let them run for a bit whether it's a week or a month depending on the amount the traffic as campaigns get 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 and there's display advertising but typically to start we're we're just figuring out where the product fits in the marketplace start off with those basics and then see what's most appropriate to go forward with I see um when you say catch all campaigns can you tell us a little bit more about what do you mean by that because you know that's afraid that's the phrase that usually comes from PPC professionals that who know what it is but if there are so many some sellers who might be interested in hearing more about what's the strategy behind the catch all campaigns 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 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'd like to see a full set of images they'd 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'd like to see for example if there's a plus content that's better than a listing that doesn't have a post on that one of the items on that checklist is advertised is advertising running on this product and if it's running it gets a better positioning 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 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 we 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 em is unhappy it can give them unexpected information about what works or doesn't work as we watch the reports come in but basically it's going to be a campaign that catches all their inventory and that's where the term comes from so older inventory goes into that campaign and basically what we'll do is every product in that campaign will have its own group even if there are different sizes of apparel or if there are different quantities of something that multi packs each product will get its own group within the campaign and as the campaign runs we'll have more data and always the data will have will match to existing exact products so that's a key awesome and how do you act when you find it like for example you just taken over in an account and you see that it doesn't have that perfect structure but it 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 I would you be afraid of that dip in performance in the meantime until you restructure everything when you restructure and then it gets reinvest and everything starts collecting data again what are your experiences for doing restructuring or the campaigns that previously didn't have such a good 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 the structure that had worked for me and that was very fair 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 the overall account performance in that situation went down what I learned is that Amazon likes existing campaigns that had history they like it and they prefer it so what I do now is I have to be very delicate 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 two additional can't 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 sells bad products you know the items for the bathroom and they had the issue that they had six or seven products in the same in the same group 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 of ones few was selling 4,000 units a month and all of the weaker SKUs were selling 20 50 80 units a month what I did was I paused the campaigns of all of the poor performing excuse I did those their own advertising and I let that campaign keep running with its best skill and as far as Amazon is concerned nothing changed for that skill yeah and that worked it actually worked very well all of the SKUs that started getting their own campaigns almost immediately went up anywhere from 2 to 5 excellent sales once they started getting their own campaigns so and one of the things we realized is that um that campaign was using up most of its budget every day what we realized was that all of the budget was going to the best selling skill all the other ones had no spend available and make sales once we started giving them their own campaign and can adjust campaign budgets for each one they'd like to spend money also and they started generating sales both headsails and organic sales as ranked without my experience is exactly the same we're also very very delicate when we're doing restructuring and it usually is you know I should one part buy one right and just like a couple of campaigns at a time simply because 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 to the example from Google like if you probably if you ran ads on Google you probably know there are quality scores the keywords and campaigns and Google also doesn't officially assign quality scores campaigns but I know for sure that they are taking into account last 28 based performance when they're assigning keyword quality scores and I think that's that's exactly what happens to Amazon campaigns and that's the reason why you know these performance tips are happening every time restructures so that's definitely something to keep in mind and when it comes to these petrol campaigns 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 poll 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 ten cents per click and just put the campaign video strategy on fixed bidding and a very large budget so for example if you have a couple of thousands of skews in that campaign you'll assign a thousand dollars 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 oh and are like for example 2 a.m. 3 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 bit and it's ten cents so someone clicks you don't pay exactly for a lot and whenever still happens it's cheap that's what we've seen and usually when you have like a huge portfolio it works really well oh there's a catch-all campaign but also some kind of you know cheap pipe that will generate the cheap a cost sales over time like an additional income stream which is interesting perhaps we have similar points of views and there's the kind of similar setting that we have in a responsive audits campaigns with different variations of course depending on the nature of the account and the category in all of the specifics they're also always better and when it comes to product targeting you have any kind of you know patterns in which cases you prefer using it so I just want to add one thing to what you said and this is part of what makes the the marketing space and Amazon so interesting which is that we don't know exactly why things happen you were mentioning that you can get you can get traffic at the times of day when people might not be advertising but my theory as to why those mullux work is actually a little bit different and 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 fifteen cents or ten cents you will typically show up on page two three twelve of a search what happens is by the time a shopper gets 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 poor 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 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 advertised be 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 I don't know that there are so many situations where a strategy of targeting page 8 is really going to be useful I think people that are talking about that I don't know what to say if I could blow it up like 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 lose a couple of extra percentage points by having extra display space on page seven but that doesn't really work for most seller you know typically giving that much attention to that strategy is not what time you're spending right I prefer to say more like you know a low-cost 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 the approach with that campaign type yes that tell me your question again because I forgot that was totally on points and what you just said yeah but the product targeting so we have two retargeting 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 they evaluate product harkening the simplest way is as the advertising runs especially with Auto campaigns Amazon is automatically putting your product on competing product pages and you'll see in your search term reports instance so that means that Amazon showed your product the shopper for lunette your product better than what the Aysen was and they chose your product if you get enough conversions like that and it's competitive you want to intentionally beyond those product pictures 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 the second way is trying to estimate where do you think you should perform well so if you have a product and that works best with mature products know if you have 20 reviews and a low price it's very clear that you should target a competitor with much fewer reviews and a higher price you should convert well in those cases 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 the third thing that I do is a little bit of a twist which is to compete against my own skills so if I have five different variations of askew I will run all of those variations in product targeting against each other and because they are highly relevant they are exactly that product page I 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 bought once they're on my page a third of the unit's would be my water bottle sponsored products as opposed to than 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 with my product selection that's very interesting I heard about that strategy and have you tested maybe how it works for upsell potentially for example if someone is selling shampoo to targets you know your own shampoo with your conditioner for example I actually have targeted that well so here's the thing I run campaigns like that and it performs but I haven't tested it on its own exclusive of everything else so what I mean is that they there is you know see there's a shampoo and I have four different sense 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 coming down has nothing else you're cutting down you're getting charged for two separate sales yes 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 but it definitely does give you some extra piece of business you find I actually had a conversation with a client about this once they sell they have a product that sells on several thousand units a month across a bunch of colors and they made a multi back and 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 individuals Q versus 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 that the more profitable skew even if my overall campus rise up and yeah that's just one of the times I learned something from my clients yeah I can totally relate I'm my clients arm I 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 features that's true with that kind of approach the first thing that comes up my mind is that with bundles you are not always able to be super specific with keyword targeting so we have to use alternative approaches like maybe you know display targeting or maybe you know sponsored 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 product 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 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 as 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 with all the bundles also there's something else but both typically introduced as a way to increase sales of something that's already doing well so there is already a baseline you want to be careful not to hurt your existing sales 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 and months and you want to make sure that they that your easy 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 SKU that cost double any of the other listings that are there yeah you're hurting your shampoo listing the shampoo listing on its own it's very competitive in sells but by being aggressive with that bundle you've hurt your initial sale SKU sales so you know that's just a clear example but I'm sure there's a lot of other ways you can play out where the idea is sounds good on the face of it of selim upselling but you might have unintended consequences that's that's very interesting um also like for example we know that when we try to advertise abundance versus individual products we just try to separate that and have like you know individual products that are oriented towards profitability and everything we can do for them to harvest even more you know sales that are affordable a cost and at the same time when the other place for bundles it's like take that growth approach and separate budget just for that and analyze 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 ask isolate that this was the reason why it happened what's your I don't think ever wants to tell you exactly why something happens once the more you know about Amazon the easier it is to manipulate things to your advantage and although both of us are working with the genuine interest of our clients you know as you can imagine there are all sorts of sellers that will things in ways that Amazon doesn't intend or want so they'll always have a layer of mystery in there typically what we do is we try to focus on the core of getting sales we want the basic ad type 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 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 a little bit here and there we'll start with things like related campaigns and the cross advertising and a little bit by little bit that'll add an incremental value to the business I see that's a very healthy approach just start with a pretty basic stuff and then build up test out whatever works interesting it's what worked for us so far cool we also discussed that you were recently on a very familiar event I can tell us a little bit more about sd-g:g and how when was the first time you were on the event and this year how was this year for you so the event we're talking about is called a Sgt G I don't actually know what a Sgt G stands for but it's not so important because it has its own reputation in the world of cellars by this point a Sgt G is a group that was started by a man named ed Rosenberg and he didn't you know he wanted to create a community for sellers that we could exchange information and ask questions and be able to get good feedback and he used a platform called telegram it's a little bit different than Facebook it's a little bit different and what's that it's a there are a few unique features about it and 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 a Sgt G 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 people's groups for people who need help with sourcing their groups for people who are new their groups for people who are advanced and there are probably six times more groups than what I just mentioned and depending on what you do there are people you know there are groups specific countries market places there's Amazon Japan and Amazon Israel Amazon UK and people will get into those to discuss issues specific to those issue no to those topics in those groups so it's wide and it's vibrant and there's a lot going on there to support those groups um he really realized that there's even India that is there also something lacking um he felt that the agendas that a lot of these connections at a lot of these events weren't so focused on what sellers really needed and in a lot of cases the netting was not so great because they might have a very very wide range of people that are not going to and with each other so he started the aah GTG event and 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 I think three percent of all sellers over a million dollars are located there and seven percent of all sellers are located in both are amazing amazing stats so he helped me event in Brooklyn it's been going on for either four or five years now 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 I sat in on all of these sessions all of the events all of the conference you know the little conferences and 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 the second year I realized that I had been seeing a lot of people I know so what ended up happening was I a little bit less time in the actual sessions and a little bit more time in the networking areas and I saw people I know 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 seeing people that you don't see anywhere except in social media you're able to have conversations you'll never have otherwise thing is that the 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 defense for me you know with the additional aspect of networking built I enjoyed it much more than the first year and this year which was just last week was again even more of a shift towards networking I hate to admit it but I probably missed half of the sessions 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 that I talked but um the ability to speak to again people that I know and people that wanted to speak to me and people that had I had an introduction with a couple of weeks ago but we said let's talk at the event it's priceless as an example I met somebody that I had done a little bit of consulting for a year ago and we didn't speak much since then even though the conversation 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 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 since you've been inside my business what do you think about this I said listen I know how you run 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 well I didn't think of that at 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 and others enough value it's going to come back to me in that big circle of how the world watch that is correct exactly out of the presentations you were able to attend can you tell us a little bit more what the content of the event is generally so at content and the ASG TG content is generally a little bit higher level than you'll hear at other charged mm-hmm there was someone speaking about driving off Amazon traffic over to your Amazon listings and they were talking about very unique things that won't hear anywhere else things like writing press releases and other you know other very unexpected ideas and tasks and you know and 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 the man named Norman Farrar he's actually got a beard larger than ours I wasn't able to pick the picture with him for compared but everybody came to me and said hey there's somebody there with the beard bigger than yours so that was one of the that was one of the presentations another one was by a man named Barry Cohen he is very very smart for whatever we've been discussing about DBC he's like four levels above us in terms of sophistication and he was talking both about advertising and also about social media and presidents in traffic that also was something that was useful 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 things you won't hear anywhere for me personally though the best event of the day was a man named Joe and I don't know how to pronounce his last name there are I keep trying to pronounce it and I won't even attempt it for the podcast but he's the man who runs a website called marketplace pulse and is basically his his publication and his marketplace pulse is dedicated to keeping tabs on Amazon and how platform is evolved in overtime 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 fish and Alibaba and to other platforms all around the world he was talking about how the makeup of sellers our Amazon how many sellers are small how many servers are large how many sellers are inactive you know for example that there are 8 million sellers in Amazon in reality 5 million are in act it's 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 thinks potential and some of the insights were very very interesting his thoughts on Walmart his thoughts on Google Shopping 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 that is top-notch and really puts the world of Amazon into a different perspective with that necessarily talking about do this or do this or do this it's nice to have a top-level view of what's happening mm-hmm 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 am guessing it will evolve did he mention anything like more specific 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 point and those are the ones which are going to 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 does 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 hundred 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 then you have a lot of traffic and they have access to a completely different base of possible showers and amazon and if they 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 can have all they have access to a lot of shoppers there's also an interesting thing where if Google starts to maybe penalized Amazon or not be so acting with giving them the best ad placements you know that could be something which sets up a very big competition between the two so that's Google they have their own spa it's a very unique spot they can take on Amazon without having to do exactly what Amazon does the other big competitor is of course for Mars and with Walmart there there are advantages 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 had 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 compat 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 if I have to shop at the Walmart near me mm-hmm Nordia 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 aisle 16 because they are home so you know I have it gives me direction it keeps me connected to Walmart and I'll also see if the wall if the you know if the thing I really want doesn't happen to be in this 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 in 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 the top of the funnel traffic you can use Amazon for purchases that are already for people who are ready to purchase and you can also list on Walmart for people who are more oriented towards you know being loyal customers but at the same time this offline presence is very strong with one I think it's also one of their main advantages oh yeah that's definitely true one of the things that's nice about Walmart is that they are still very selective and who they allow to sell so just the fact that you can get on to Walmart gives you better exposure and you'll actually be able to put up a pretty nice proportion of sales compared to Amazon they say you know the proportion of sales you get is far out of out of relation to Amazon's versus Walmart's overall ecommerce sites yeah I haven't thought of that but actually it means less competition and higher conversion rates right that's the idea yeah I was just speaking with 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 the the conversion rates are very very high with the advertiser so having access to those shoppers can be very useful and do you know maybe what are the main parameters that someone should what are the main condition someone should meet there in order to list on Walmart 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 that 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 a Walmart Google mmm-hmm okay it does sound like something worth looking into because it's a new and up-and-coming platform online for selling online so whoever wants to expand their presence and maximize sales should think but should have a multi-platform approach definitely so Walmart there's one of their first dates to discover agreed yet that I would definitely agree with okay interesting insights you have shared with us today is there anything else you'd like to say to our audiences oh boy I wasn't ready for this question um the only thing I can say is don't get discouraged after a week 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 mm-hmm take a little bit more time and see how things go and try to make some adjustments that's some good advice 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 can't afford even that's timeless which is why yeah yeah I would definitely say it's I have friends that 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 Nathan you can achieve within 30 60 90 days 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 want yeah that's true under thank you a for being our guest today and it was very elite from you again soon definitely I'm always happy to help you help your audience and 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 to two apes agency website as well as a GTG link for anyone who wants to join their telegram messaging platform for self alright I appreciate it thank you