How to Use PPC & DSP to Boost Sales with Will Haire

hi guys and welcome to another episode on Amazonia PPC YouTube channel and for today episode we have a very special guest it's will hair from bwi's agency and he's going to talk about how to use PPC together with DSP and will welcome eigor thanks for having me man I'm excited to be here to talk about my favorite topic all things advertising on Amazon awesome awesome well for the start for those uh people who maybe haven't heard about you or or what you do in your agency tell us a little bit about yourself and what you guys do yeah definitely so myself professionally I'm an Advertiser by trait I've been doing uh I started off with Google advertising in the early uh 2010s and I moved over to to Amazon and I've been doing that for a little over 10 years at this point uh everything from programmatic streaming TV to payperclick and it's been uh a fun ride uh as an agency um we we do full Channel um management for marketplaces primarily Amazon and Walmart so we help Brands uh with their marketing their advertising their Logistics and inventory management and it's a a large part of what we do and today we managed a little over half a billion dollars in sales on the platform we've worked with uh Enterprise level brands that you've probably heard of as well as small businesses so we've been really blessed with uh the types of brands that we've gotten work with and I'm excited to share some of our stories and experience with you and your audience today yeah you've been in in the space for so long and especially since you start with Google and I very often we have also experience in Google we we don't offer those Services anymore but I very often I'm I I really laughing uh about some of the functionalities that Amazon is presenting us like hey this is going this is the tool that you're going to have right now and Google had that for free like years ago oh yeah and many more details but still yeah for Amazon it's uh it's absolutely uh news especially with DSP you know that you can compare it like if I remember correctly to Google Display Network right yeah similar to that very similar yeah yeah uh so uh can you tell us a little bit more about how you you how you guys leverage both PPC and DSP together to to bring more sales to to Brands beautiful I would say off the bat no matter what we uh I would say for 80% of the brands we work with we definitely do pay-per-click and we do DSP together and the concept is it gives us the ability for more enhanced targeting and we do like a bottomup approach uh so the concept is like whenever we start working we're going to blanket payperclick we're going to make sure we're getting people in Market searching for for your brand searching for related products and going after competitors through conquesting and then an easy layer over that that's like going to get you the best return uh for your programmatic investment is going to be remarketing so a lot of times what we'll do on our listings people who viewed and didn't make a purchase on competitor's listings or people who are searching in our category but have yet to make a purchase in that category these are all indicators that people are these Shoppers are towards the bottom of the funnel and so uh at the minimum we want to get them with payperclick get them into our funnel and then use programmatic as a way to consistently expose these Shoppers to our products over time with the goal of soliciting them to make a purchase ideally within the first two to three days but we could do it for as long as 30 days depending on how depending on the buying cycle for the products the more expensive the longer it takes the less expensive the shorter right so uh you quickly covered so many interesting points there um but so far I've seen that uh brands are usually stuck with the very first step where uh what is the point for them to start to think about DSP I suppose that it's not going to like the U have so many things in PPC to to be solv but they also want to start DSP is there some like um uh point that they have to reach in PPC before starting with DSP I'm just thinking maybe it is maybe it's not so what do you what's your thought thoughts on that so it depends your philosophy and aggressive you want to be I would say what I find is that businesses who are doing under a million dollars a year um they may get stuck between like 50 to 60k a month in revenue and they're like they're finding it hard to get sales consistently they're going to be a good candidate to run programmatic and what they're the use case that they're probably experiencing is that their category is getting saturated with more sellers it's becoming more competitive maybe demand is fluctuating so cpcs are more expensive um and therefore it's getting difficult to fill the mid and upper funnel with Shoppers who are interested or potentially interested and therefore you're just competing with everybody else on the bottom of the funnel and it gets expensive and it's hard to do and it's not going to last forever so programmatic advertising gives us the ability to start introducing your products to Shoppers mid and upper funnel and I'm able to introduce your products to them on and off the platform I could drive to landing pages if it's an expensive product and requires some educ a so like I would say that you mean like off off Amazon right landing pages exactly okay y exactly nice and so th those would be indicators of like yeah you should consider programmatic or another venue to acquire traffic so we deal with programmatic DSP but maybe you consider sit meta ads maybe you do Tik Tok maybe you do search maybe you buy email list like there's all different ways to get traffic but from us as advertisers and when we look at Amazon uh PPC is the easiest and it's going to give us the best return Then programmatics number two and then streaming TV sits on top of that and that's going to be number three and you know each server purpose up the funnel nice and I've seen different uh information and I got different information from uh a few um people from Amazon and those who are providing seats to to DSP about what is the minimum ad that they need to spend in order to actually use the DSP I know in the past it was like I don't know 35 Grand or for for us uh so what are what information do you have about those limitations like for somebody starting uh in DSP in US versus uh Europe so what are the what is the minimum spend that they can actually start with in order to to use the DSP beautiful so with DSP if you work directly with Amazon as a man manage service so Amazon's going to manage your DSP you're looking at probably $15,000 minimum uh they're going to try to push you to spend that in a month you could probably spend it in two months maybe three if you could get really lucky uh but they'll be looking for at least that type of commitment to get started uh when you work with an agency like ourself there's no minimum um so we we could spend $500 if that's all it's take which is why we're able to have a bottomup approach should be more kind of Raz uh driven because there's no minimums for us we could just you know allocate and typically in Old transparency excuse me uh about 20% of the budget so like 80% is typically what we do for payperclick uh I would say 15% is going to be your DSP and then 5% is going to be your streaming TV and that's like a pretty typical uh budget location now if a brand came to us that said we want more awareness we have a product launch we're we're willing to spend more on getting eyeballs you know then it might be 40% on DSP and we might do like 10 or 15% on uh on streaming TV so it varies but in most cases what we usually see about 15% is going to be DSP 5% streaming TV which is all done through DSP and the majority of it is going to be done uh payperclick right on right on Amazon because it has the best returns nice and since you mentioned streaming TV uh what are your uh takeaways on that I know that there there's that um creatives needs to be done in a certain way a certain length like what what was it 30 seconds straight if I'm not yeah so and how what have you seen with working with with the brands in your experience using the streaming TV um in terms of what are some of the kpis that you track when using streaming TV and how that incorporates into the bigger picture yeah we look for a brand lift over time in all transparency streaming TV is top of the funnel so it takes a long time for it to bake so a lot of times we take a small portion of the budget and we kind of just run it in the background to get that exposure and over time we're measuring uh brand search inquiries we're trying to figure out if we're getting a lift there outside of that detail page views video completion but all the videos most of them are not skippable so they're all technically completed yeah it's a great metric yeah um but the detail page views and the uh the impressions are probably the biggest because it's it's upper funnel and then from there we have the QR code on there so if anybody actually scans or engages we get that information and then more importantly we're able to take that audience and then push them they become part of our audience so we push them with remarketing ads we get them with display ads and then ideally we get them on on the platform but streaming TV is not a Raz driven um feature or platform uh you're really going to be want to looking at Impressions detail page views video maybe um I feel like it's it's maybe a good tool to use uh for example if you an established brand and you plan a product launch next summer because it's a seasonal product and you start to I don't know uh early early spring and you start to use streaming TV just to yeah make people aware of your maybe new product that's coming in and just like before the product launch or something like that just prepare them and like awareness of what's coming yeah what we um what one one brand asked us to to do um okay and um for somebody just tapping into DSP what are some of the strategies that you can in a nutshell of course you can recommend for example for for starting out because I've heard uh from many sellers that they're just not convinced that DSP is good for them and that they're going to get a good bank for their Buck like what is it that they can start with with with you or with us or anybody else like hey I want to start with this uh type of ads this strategy just to see if there's money for us or not so what would you recommend for starting out yeah this is great I I'm going to go back to the bottom up approach and what I'd say at the minimum to get started remarketing the second audience that's going to get you probably the best return is putting a pixel on your website and building Affinity audiences so lookalike audiences based on website data uh the third audience that's pretty effective is um storefronts so your brand and competitor brand storefronts and targeting Shoppers that engage them uh the fourth audience conqu point I haven't thought about it yeah yeah I love DSP I could talk about it all day AOC conquesting is the next thing like get get competitors and start stocking their top products with your top products uh if you have there's lots of different ways like if you have a product at a competitive price point use that if you have a product with better reviews use that so like there's all different ways of conquesting and then I would say you know those are the bottom so like those are going to give you the best return and you want to do them in pieces because they're expensive you don't want to do them all at once typically you know for just program at like just DSP obviously like Amazon own and operated property is going to cost you more so you probably look at a like7 to2 a CPM for Amazon own and operated properties you're looking at maybe like three to $6 for um thirdparty Supply networks that you can access through there and then streaming TV would see like $30 to $35 per CPM but if you compare that to like Disney or Hulu or Netflix they're closer to like $50 a CPM linear TV like your traditional TV those are over $100 per CPM so from a CPM perspective uh your streaming TV is going to be the most expensive but it's cheaper compared to the market um then secondarily Amazon own and operated properties will be your second most expensive but that's going to get you the best returns because it's Amazon data and then last but not least the thirdparty suppliers they're going to be the cheapest but they're they're mixed bag sometimes you get good audiences and it actually drives your turn more often than not you I feel like those third-party websites they can be um manipulated and I my humble opinion without being able to prove it is that I think more often than not the validity of the traffic from those third- party suppliers or not very good um so generally if I break it out my budgets Amazon's where I'm put most of it as long as I get the return yeah so those are pretty good points for somebody to uh to be hooked up hooked up on on DSP and just like uh now they're going to love it h you mentioned really interesting little point is that Gathering data from a pixel installed on your website which perfectly aligns with what everybody is saying and I I I'm one of those people too that brand must have a brand not not Amazon brand but they need to create a brand of Amazon at least to have a website at least for because today you can have that like in five minutes either with AI or uh just buy it like already uh pre-filled with with images and everything just pay somebody to to change the images and text uh because why for example I as a Shopper when I never heard about a brand I'm going to Google it and see if there's actual a brand that they have a website what are the prices on a website is it a real brand or a fake brand is it Chinese or whatever so it really boost confidence in a in a brand in when somebody never heard about it um but still this is also an interesting point because uh Google analytics provides so much data on customer behavior on audiences then it we can easily assume that uh from the data that we gather on our website about our customer Persona that same people are buying on Amazon but just with a bu higher buying intent and uh to your point also uh having a website uh enables you to use DSP pixel and even more functionalities as you said to to gather more um data on your audience uh awesome awesome I love it man hey you hit on the head too I think it's really interesed too like if you're looking at like um if you're a brand and you're looking at like phases of like uh my clout of my product it's like if you're in brick and mortar retail your clout people see you there and they're like oh they're legit they're in Brick and mor secondarily it's going to be like commercials TV commercials if somebody sees the commercial like oh they must be good and then third it's going to be your website you know they're going to check it out on the website and provides that kind of authority so you definitely nailed it that's the best thing an Amazon only brand can do is like at the very minimum just have a website so somebody else can search you make sure you're real yeah and I was um I was recording an episode on YouTube and I was I literally done that so I saw two I I think it was like knife blocks or something like that but uh both Brands had amazing reviews like 2,000 reviews five 4.5 stars but one of them had a website and the other didn't when you search for Google for a for a brand name you get nothing you you get only Amazon results but when you browse the another one you get a beautiful website with night nice images immediately that's the one I'm I'm going to buy from because and it's so cheap to have that leverage for Brands it's never been cheaper to your point AI I mean it's you could pretty much say build me a onepage website you know if you don't have a lot of products it does not need to be fancy um back to DSP um on DSP there's on Amazon targeting and off Amazon targeting um what can you tell us at a very basic level for somebody who's don't know much about DSP um what are the differences and where uh should Brands be going like to choose if they're going to use off Amazon or Amazon uh targeting beautiful yeah great question so I'd say primarily your Amazon targeting if it shows up on Amazon own and operator properties but mainly it's going to be Amazon it's going to be the most expensive but it's going to get you the best results you know the data is cleaner they they know they have you know 300 million Prime Shoppers so like the data is there that they could test against uh it'll be better the third party suppliers and even uh Amazon own and operated properties so like not doc but their other properties they own um they're going to be more expensive than the third party um because of the purity of that data um but obviously when you're this is the best thing for your to do it's like when you're engaging some body off of the platform it will cost a lot more effort and cost you a lot more investment to get somebody to move off of something when they're not in shopping mindset so like if I'm on a fisherman's website because I like fishing and I'm getting served fishing rods yeah like it's relevant and it's contextual but if I'm just reading the chances that I'm going to click on that ad and make the purchase is pretty slim MH uh but I am reinforcing my brand I'm getting connected to in the fishing example like my rods are associated with this magazine and that magazine could have clout therefore I'm building uh I'm aligning with my brand with something my audience gets value to and like that's kind of how it works powerful yeah exactly exactly so so it's a long way of saying like in the short term on Amazon Amon traffic is going to be the best because like it's closer to the point of purchase in the long term and kind of how dsps like designed to work you kind of want to do you want a good mix and you do want to have that off Amazon presence because you want to catch your people contextually when they're researching when they're participating with whatever is associated with your product so um so may not drive the best results but it does work together better together and that's how that's definitely the the best um thing because there's so many people out there and it's a pretty wide net when you use it like that um thank you very much uh the other things uh yeah for me on thep audiences are the the best thing ever so it can be really creepy the level of details that you can have over there like really stagger it like I don't know know only females only this age only mother of four year olds like because Amazon knows what what you're shopping so if um a brand is very uh Niche oriented then it it can be there's no nothing more powerful than that like you can really di down and just Target like I don't know 100,000 people but really the ones that are with a high buy bu intend and it's not just uh products anymore so like Amazon I can now get like MasterCard data which could give me insights into like people buying houses people in market for cars like it's it's big brother at its finest but like that data is there you could build audiences off of so um Amazon's trying to be all be the be all and end all for everything and uh there's a lot of power in that data yeah like there's also one uh called recent movers a there so imagine that like you just moved and you have your ads tailored to what you just need in your new house so yeah an advertises dream right before you're even moving you're getting ads for boxes and bubble wrap and all that other stuff right so uh definitely all what you said um paints a picture that it's incredibly useful tool and I I encourage all people listening to really dive into that because there's so many things that they can um use it for um lastly don't want this to be uh too long if somebody needs more uh if somebody has more questions about DSP what is the best option that they contact you awesome thanks yeah so check me out on LinkedIn will hair like on your head with an E I put something out um you know almost every day in terms of video content or articles to help you sell more product on Amazon and if you have any specific questions you can just shoot me a message on there you can also check out our website bellav vix.com and you can fill out a form and somebody from our team will reach out to you uh within a day or two nice thank you for sharing all this uh all this valuable information I really appreciate it and I'm sure that a lot of people will make it uh uh will will use it and Implement very very soon because it's it's just unbelievable heck yeah well eagor I appreciate being on the show thanks for having me and this was a lot of fun great catching up pleasure it was a pleasure real byebye