In this episode, host Josh interviews entrepreneur Rolando Rosas about his journey from office technology to Amazon selling and founding Circuit Com. Rolando shares his advanced PPC strategy, using a year’s worth of sales data and heat maps to optimize Amazon ad scheduling for better ROAS. He offers practical tips for sellers: enhance product images, respond to customer questions with videos, and use data tools like Seller Labs Data Hub to identify peak buying times. Rolando encourages starting small with data-driven ad adjustments to boost efficiency and sales.

Chapters:

Introduction to Rolando Rosas and His Journey (00:00:00)
Josh introduces Rolando, his entrepreneurial background, and the founding of Global Tech Worldwide and Circuit Com.

Podcast Sound Effects and Stream Deck Tips (00:01:15)
Rolando shares his experience setting up podcast sound effects and encourages using a stream deck.

Introduction to Innovative Amazon PPC Strategy (00:01:38)
Josh prompts Rolando to share his unique PPC strategy, setting the stage for the main discussion.

Data-Driven Ad Scheduling and Heat Maps (00:02:13)
Rolando explains using 12 months of order data and Seller Labs Data Hub to create heat maps for ad scheduling.

Key Insights from Data: Golden Hours and Days (00:02:59)
Discovery of optimal times and days for ads, including patterns like low Friday evening and weekend sales.

Challenging Weekend Ad Spend Myths (00:04:12)
Rolando debunks the idea that weekends are best for ads, showing most sales occur Monday–Friday.

Impact on ROAS and Sales Performance (00:06:03)
Discussion of improved ROAS and sales by focusing ad spend on high-performing days and times.

Layering Day Parting and Low Bid Strategies (00:07:02)
Exploring advanced ad scheduling, including low bid strategies during off-peak hours.

Manual vs. Automated Campaign Management (00:08:31)
Rolando discusses the manual nature of their current process and the use of portfolio grouping for easier management.

Leveraging Seller Labs Data Hub for Insights (00:09:36)
How to use Seller Labs Data Hub for actionable business insights, even for non-data experts.

The Importance of Data Science and AI for Sellers (00:10:53)
Emphasizing the future role of data analytics and AI in Amazon selling success.

Three Actionable Takeaways for Amazon Sellers (00:11:56)
Josh summarizes three key takeaways: main image optimization, customer Q&A engagement, and data-driven ad scheduling.

Encouragement to Start Small and Test Strategies (00:15:20)
Advice to implement changes gradually, testing on a few campaigns or SKUs before scaling.

Closing Remarks and Appreciation (00:16:18)
Josh and Rolando wrap up the episode, express mutual appreciation, and end the conversation.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Websites
“Global Teck Worldwide“: “00:00:00”
“Seller Labs Data Hub“: “00:02:59”
“Google Sheets“: “00:10:08”

Strategies and Concepts
“Day Parting”: “00:02:13”
“Heat Map”: “00:02:59”

Actionable Takeaways
“Adjust Main Images”: “00:11:56”
“Respond to Customer Questions”: “00:12:07”

Transcript:

Josh 00:00:00  Today I’m super excited to introduce you all to Rolando Rosas. Rolando never could have predicted that a college computer, a printer, and an old school wall phone in his kitchen would lead him down the path of entrepreneurship. But that’s exactly how it happened. In 2002, he founded Global Tech Worldwide with the goal of making it easy for businesses to use the right office technologies for better and frictionless customer interactions that help businesses elevate their customer interactions and turn them into rich, meaningful discussions. Fast forward to today, and after spending ten years selling on Amazon, he is on his third startup circuit. Com because he was frustrated with the lack of transparency and outdated methods of buying broadband, wireless and fiber internet for small and medium sized businesses. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Rolando.

Rolando 00:00:53  Woo! Woo woo woo woo. Woo woo. Let me try. Let me try.

Josh 00:00:56  Hey, there you go. Hey.

Rolando 00:00:57  There we go.

Josh 00:00:58  You got the audio work?

Rolando 00:00:59  I got it, I got it I got him to work.

Josh 00:01:02  Rolando has his own podcast and we recorded an episode last week I was on, I was in the reverse side. I was the guest there. And that I told you, Rolando, I love the sound effects that you have going on in your podcast.

Rolando 00:01:15  You know what? I’m here. You know what? Go get a stream deck, go get it and call me, and I’ll help you set it up. Because it took me a while. I left it in the box for quite some time before I actually started using it, because I was a little intimidated. I’m not an Avi guy or anything like that, but, you know, I was like, all right, let me add one, two, three. And I was like, ooh. And now I’ve got a couple of those buttons set up for it.

Josh 00:01:38  I love it, I love it. All right, Rolando, there’s another really wicked smart strategy that I want you to share with our audience that you shared with me prior to hitting the record button.

Josh 00:01:48  And this is your amazing PPC strategy that I have never heard anybody else talk about this other than yourself. everybody’s always heard of de parting, right? And that’s kind of the new hot PPC term, but this isn’t Dave Harding. This is something, I think, even more intelligent than what De parting is. So I’ve laid out the red carpet for you there, Rolando. Give us the gold nugget.

Rolando 00:02:13  Yeah, right. So de parting is just simply ad scheduling. You know, run an ad on a schedule. Nothing new there. But what if. Chad. Chad, I was just talking to Chad. What if Josh. We could map or have ads show up when we have our ideal customers on Amazon? How can we do that? Can we pull it off? And can we save money while we’re doing that? That’s really what we wanted to find out. Turns out there is a way to do it. Not easy, not clean. But there was. So we went and pulled data from our orders for 12 months, and we used, Seller Labs product that they have or service that’s called Data Hub.

Rolando 00:02:59  and it pulled in all that data, right? It’s our own data. So we didn’t have to do all these crazy reports from Amazon. Pulled it all in. Once they pulled that in I said, wait a minute, guys. I’m not a mathematician here. This is just a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers. Can we do something better? So then we put together something that anybody could easily use in the organization. We put together a heat map so that you can visually see the data. And, you know, dark green means good, red is bad. And guess what? We found golden hours every day of the week. Also golden months also patterns within those months. For example summertime for our products which are mostly office related products. After 4 p.m. on a Friday, we’ve virtually had no orders on the summer months. So if I’m a betting man, Why would I run PPC after 4 p.m. if we’re not getting any orders? Another one was when? on the weekends, you hear people say this all the time.

Rolando 00:04:12  And now that I have the data for our stuff, I know it’s totally wrong. You got to run ads on Saturday and Sunday because people browse Saturday and Sunday and buy on Monday. The evidence does not hold that up in our case, because in our case, most of our activity, nearly 85 to 90% of the purchases came Monday through Friday. So if I’m advertising, why would I want to focus on that 5 to 10%? Does it make sense? It’s not going to move the needle. Let’s focus on that 85 to 90% that can it can move the needle and dump money into that. And now, for the last 90, 120 days that we’ve been doing, we’ve been able to improve our tacos, we’ve been able to improve our sales with the ad spend that we were using, were they also able to improve the organic? So in all three metrics, the intelligent way of using ads throughout the day is better than blanketing that money every single day of the week. That just doesn’t make sense.

Josh 00:05:18  Yeah. One thing, as you talked about that, Rolando, I think one of the key metrics that you could start tracking is almost like, what is your tacos at a daily basis? What’s my tacos on Monday compared to tacos on Friday? Right. What’s my tacos on Saturday and Sunday? And probably even though you’re going to spend less money on Saturday and Sunday. And I’d be curious to hear, you know, if you have data or, you know, even just ballpark of what that data might have been. My hypothesis is that on Saturday, Sunday, you’re spending less, but also there’s a lot fewer orders happening. So your tacos could actually be a lot higher on Monday or Saturday and Sunday.

Rolando 00:06:03  Yeah, the Roas was really bad on the weekend. I got to tell you. So, it was double up. Sorry. So it would be the reverse. So Roas was half. So let’s just use round numbers if our Roas was ten. Monday through Friday it was five on the weekends.

Rolando 00:06:21  Right. Yeah. So again another reason why the weekends were so bad. And I just got to believe that the customer again get back to our discussion about intent platform. The customer on the weekends maybe has lower intent. Maybe they’re browsing more and the ones on the weekdays which are probably our more ideal customers, or those that are closer to the bottom of the funnel that are ready to hit add to cart are probably shopping Monday through Friday versus Saturday and Sunday.

Josh 00:06:55  And specific days, specific days and then specific times of the day. Correct.

Rolando 00:07:02  So, correct.

Josh 00:07:03  So you kind of layered in day partying to an extent on this.

Rolando 00:07:06  Right. So most of the departing stuff right now will just let you turn it on and off. You know, for a certain time. So 3 a.m., no reason for us to be a, be the late night show at 3 a.m. and get clicks. We saw two few orders, you know, at those extreme times. Are there opportunities? I just heard somebody say something the other day that I think we’re going to try for those hours that you’re not advertising on.

Rolando 00:07:33  So let’s let’s just say we do Monday through Friday, 12 to 5 p.m. and just 12 to 5. All those other hours, we run a low bid strategy to try to see if we can get some of those clicks going into that, and I, I haven’t tried it yet, but this person said he heard me talk about day parting a couple of weeks ago, and it worked for him. And then he tried this low bid Strategy in the off hours, as we’ll call it. That’s working for him too. So I haven’t tried it, but I heard somebody say this is something they’ve augmented with, something that I talked about recently.

Josh 00:08:07  Fascinating. So with that, then if you’re trying to advertise between the hours of like 12 and five, are you juicing up your top of search adjustment for those specific times of the day? and then my follow up question to that would be, how are you doing that? Because that sounds like it would be a very manual effort. Do you have software that’s automating this.

Rolando 00:08:31  That, you know, it’s manual right now and basically because is there we’re trying to find a formula, you know, a plus B equals C. Right. And and it doesn’t work that way very cleanly. Right. So to get it to scale you really need to find shortcuts. So one of the shortcuts is we have things in the portfolio side right. So we could group things together. These are these group of products. And when we look at that. Oh yeah, this one has a 20 ROI versus this group of products. Now we have a much more an easier way to get at trying to manage that versus, you know, I have a phrase campaign, I have a broad match campaign. And then if you’re looking at Seller Central or some software, you know, you get a list of 100 campaigns. Oh, crap. Which one is important? Which one’s not? The grouping into portfolios was a really smart way to do it. Yeah, regardless if it’s a broad match and exact and all the rest, that’s kind of the the shorthand that, that, that we’ve been using in order to get at trying to manage multiple campaigns.

Josh 00:09:36  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, one thing before we kind of wrap everything up, one thing I wanted to touch on, you talked about feeding all of your data into the Seller Labs data hub. is there any other ways that you’re using that data intelligently for your business? And is that something that you would recommend And other sellers do. And, you know, for somebody that isn’t a data nerd and doesn’t geek out on data. would that still be a useful tool for them and what type of insights could they find?

Rolando 00:10:08  So yeah, you’re going to have your own data, in Google Sheets so you can play with it. Massage it. Turn it upside down. And if you are a data geek or you have some of those on your team, they’re going to love it. I heard the other day some folks like that are aggregators that are trying to do all this stuff like that, that that helps them too. So they have a lot of data geeks. Now, if you’re on the other side of the spectrum, and you’re the business owner or you’re somebody that’s maybe not a data nerd, you can get from them something like templates so that it just feeds into a template, and then your data is there and populated, and you’ll be able to see it in, you know, you want it like almost like a quick book style manner where you’re looking at profit and loss.

Rolando 00:10:53  It makes sense. You’re looking at PPC, It makes sense. You want the heat map? It makes sense. So whether you’re a data nerd or you’re on the other side of the spectrum like I am, and you’re not as much of a data nerd, you’re like, okay, now it makes sense because I visually see it rather than just long columns of data, so I wouldn’t be intimidated. if you use templates, I mean, it’s what they’re there for to try to make your life easier so you can get other data. Yeah, they do a bunch. I mean, we have we’re only scratching the surface with this. And I think, Josh, moving forward, data science, data analytics and artificial intelligence is what’s going to lead the way for Amazon sellers. Without those three things you’re going to be stuck in where we were maybe four years ago. You got to have those three as part of your playbook.

Josh 00:11:48  Yeah. All right, Rolando, as we wrap things up, I love to leave our audience and listeners with three actionable takeaways from each episode.

Josh 00:11:56  Here are the three actionable takeaways that I’ve noted. Rolando. Let me know if you think I’m missing something here. Okay, but number one is adjusting and tweaking and refining your main image in order to be seen as a more premium option in the marketplace. This is easy, low hanging fruit to where you just need to evaluate what is the competition look like. Most of them all look the exact same, so go do something a little bit different and and a good way to do this is go look at the premium brands that are out there. Go to you know Tiffany Co go to a Louis Vuitton a Gucci and look at the images that they create for their products and take, you know, take what’s working for them and apply it into your own product. So that would be action item number one. Action item number two is if you’re not already doing this, go ahead and be more diligent at responding to the customer questions that come through. That’s number one. Number two. If you’re already doing that, start testing out by replying to those questions with videos.

Josh 00:13:07  I think we we also talked about this last week in your podcast, where the video takes up even more space than what is taken up just with a simple text reply. So now you’re talking about taking up even more page space, which is why people do digital bundles on Amazon and everybody’s talking about how do I occupy more real estate? Adding videos to that Q&A section. Pushes your competitors further away from.

Rolando 00:13:34  Amazon’s A Game of monopoly. You know, you got to own more digital real estate and videos and all these other things we talked about will help you take up more pieces of board and take them off. Take the competitors off the board, so to speak. That’s what you want to do with that.

Josh 00:13:50  I love that analogy, I love that. And then last but not least with that strategy is start juicing some of the keywords that you can add into those questions and answers. Right. So doubt is are there any prohibited terms that you can’t include in your listing. But it’s totally within the toes of Amazon to have a customer ask that question.

Josh 00:14:12  And for you to answer that question with that keyword, you could do the same thing with brand terms if you’re trying to rank for a branded search term. So there’s some golden nuggets there. Take action on that. Last but not least, the third actionable takeaway. And I’m going to kind of roll this up into one big one. But it’s start analyzing your data. And if you’re not currently doing that, use tools such as power buy or use, you know, Seller Labs data Hub and start looking at the data. Then if you want to take things to the next level, do what Rolando talked about and create a heat map. When are your customers purchasing? What times of the day. What days of the week are those orders coming through? Then go ahead and layer on your ad spend over those different times of day. Days of the week and then calculate what is your return on ad spend during each of those different days and times. Then you can become more intelligent, turning on and off your ads at specific times and even specific days of the week.

Josh 00:15:18  So, Rolando.

Rolando 00:15:20  I would say there that for those people that are doing that, you feel a little afraid about making changes to your ads. Take one campaign or two campaigns and do that with see what happens. Let it ride for a few weeks or a month or two, and you’ll have more confidence about rolling it out, because that’s what we ended up doing. Ultimately, let’s do this with a handful of campaigns out of like almost 200 that we’re running. What happens then? And then over time, we migrated almost all of our campaigns over to this intelligent ad scheduling.

Josh 00:15:52  Awesome. That is good input and in good advice for our listeners. Start small with all of these strategies. You don’t have to go and redo all of your main images. Start with one skew, right? No doubt to do all the Q and A’s. Start with one skew. Focus on it. See what happens. Look at the data. Use all of those data points that Rolando previously talked about that will tell you yes, this is working or it’s not.

Josh 00:16:18  Rolando, this has been an amazing conversation. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned.

Rolando 00:16:24  A lot from you. Hold up.

Josh 00:16:26  Hey, there we go.

Rolando 00:16:27  Josh. Not for me, but for Josh.

Josh 00:16:31  Hey, you can self promote yourself to give yourself a clap.

Rolando 00:16:35  Okay, I’ll give myself a double clap.

Josh 00:16:38  And now, Rolando. Karen. Karen wisdom with us all dropping knowledge bombs so well. Rolando, thank you so much for joining us today and I appreciate your time.

Rolando 00:16:51  Thank you. Josh, I appreciate for you bringing me in today and thank you very much.