In this episode, Josh interviews George Meressa, founder of ClearAds, about effective Amazon DSP advertising strategies. George explains how to vet DSP agencies, select high-performing products for campaigns, and leverage remarketing, cross-selling, and competitor targeting using Amazon’s data analytics. He emphasizes the importance of choosing certified partners, analyzing product conversion rates, and methodically building campaigns. The discussion includes actionable tips for maximizing ROAS and practical advice for supplement brands and other sellers aiming to scale with DSP. The episode concludes with key takeaways for listeners interested in leveraging Amazon DSP for business growth.

Chapters:

Introduction & Guest Background (00:00:00)
George Meressa’s experience in digital advertising and focus on Amazon PPC and DSP.

Vetting a DSP Agency (00:00:40)
Checklist for choosing a DSP agency, importance of official partners, and due diligence questions.

Transition to DSP Strategies (00:03:16)
Emphasizing the importance of agency selection before starting DSP strategies.

Selecting Products for DSP (00:03:41)
Criteria for choosing products: retail readiness, sales volume, impressions, and conversion rates.

Remarketing as First Strategy (00:03:45)
Remarketing setup: targeting product viewers who haven’t purchased, and audience segmentation.

Product Data & Conversion Rate Analysis (00:04:59)
Importance of product data, minimum impressions, and conversion rate benchmarks for DSP success.

Audience Segmentation for Retargeting (00:06:27)
Creating and excluding specific audiences for more effective retargeting campaigns.

Cross-Selling & Market Basket Analysis (00:07:14)
Using brand analytics and market basket analysis to build cross-sell campaigns.

Advanced Audience Targeting & Overlap Reports (00:08:18)
Utilizing overlap reports, refining audience targeting, and future of display ads.

Bespoke ASIN Targeting & Subscribe & Save Strategies (00:09:13)
Custom ASIN targeting, strategies for subscribe & save products, and using purchase window data.

Competitor Targeting for Supplements (00:11:17)
Targeting competitor’s customers for supplements and the strong DSP fit for supplement brands.

Episode Wrap-Up & Actionable Takeaways (00:11:41)
Summary of key strategies, actionable steps, and importance of methodical DSP campaign building.

DSP Product Fit & Data-Driven Decisions (00:13:37)
Discussion on product suitability for DSP, importance of impressions and conversion rates.

Layering DSP Strategies Up the Funnel (00:14:37)
Methodical approach: start with retargeting, analyze results, and progressively add advanced strategies.

Closing & Contact Information (00:15:27)
How to contact George Meressa and Clear Ads for DSP services and further advice.

Links and Mentions:

Amazon Accredited Partners Page: “00:01:48”
Brand Metrics: “00:05:47”
Overlap Reports: “00:08:18”
Prosper Show: “00:08:18”
Nozzle: “00:10:12”
ClearAds: “00:15:53”

Transcript:

Josh 00:00:00  I am super excited to introduce you all to George Meressa. George has been in digital advertising since 2009, working on a wide range of platforms including Amazon, Google, Bing, LinkedIn and Facebook. Paid advertising. Using these platforms, he has worked with hundreds of advertisers across the world in numerous industries and sectors to maximize their ROAS. His agency, Clear Ads, now focuses purely on Amazon PPC and DSP advertising, helping deliver the best results for his clients. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, George.

George 00:00:38  Thank you so much for having me, Josh. It’s a pleasure.

Josh 00:00:40  What are some of the what’s a checklist that you should kind of go through and walk through to vet an agency that you’re looking to have, do DSP for you?

George 00:00:48  The first thing is don’t go with Amazon. Right. But I’m sure they won’t mind me saying this. Right. But actually they will. But I’m going to say anyway, Amazon’s core strategy is to get you to spend as much money as possible. That’s their KPI because that’s how they get promoted.

George 00:01:02  Right. So the way they treat your account is they go, hey, look at all these amazing impressions that you’ve got. Isn’t that great? And as I said, you’re like, hold on one step. Precious isn’t really the key thing for us. Like we’re trying to get. We’re trying to we’re trying to grow our business. Not not just increase our reach. So that’s the big thing that they go with, especially with the slight uncertainty with attribution at the moment. It could look to to their favor. Right. That’s the first thing. Now second, when you do go to an agency, the first step you should take is go onto Amazon’s accredited partners page. Right. And check out DSP providers. So Amazon DSP providers just put stuff on Google. Go onto Amazon’s page and there’s a list of DSP providers. Right. So what you tend to find if you find any company. Right. If they’re if they’re if they are an official partner with Amazon, they will tend to have a partner badge somewhere which links straight to that page which shows you, hey, their official partner.

George 00:01:58  Now, if they’re not an official partner, they might be piggybacking off someone else’s suit. Right. You don’t want to get into that. Because if they’re piggybacking off someone else’s seat. Right. Let’s just say there’s some internal issues and they get kicked out of that seat. They no longer have access to your account. Who do you contact? Yeah. Who do? Who do you reach? You don’t know. Right. So you want to make sure you’ve got someone who’s got their own first thing. The second thing is, I’m sure every seller that’s listening to this, they’re savvy. They have a pool. An audience of other savvy sellers. Speak to them, find out who are they using that’s doing DSP. That’s working really well. Right. Get their first, first, first glance and say, okay, what’s your experience been like? and ensure that they’re happy with whoever it is. So they’re the steps that I would recommend taking when trying to find a DSP agent. I would even go as far as ask them questions about the business.

George 00:02:49  What’s the purpose of the business? What are you looking to do? How big is it? How long has it been going? Is it? Is it a brand new business that’s business. Me starting up for a bit and might not be there tomorrow. Yeah. Is it one that’s been there for a while? Is it, you know, you want to you just want to really find out how many DSP, agents you have. How many of them are certified? how many have taken the exams? I would just do your due diligence. Ask those questions before it’s too late, and then before you’re stuck with someone.

Josh 00:03:16  Yeah, I think that is foundation number one for sure. So I hope our listeners follow those best practices because it’s true. You make this decision, and it’s not like you could just change course after six months or a year. otherwise you’re just starting from ground zero all over again. All right. Now let’s jump into these strategies. Let’s say you have found the right agency to work with.

Josh 00:03:41  What’s the first strategy you should be implementing with DSP?

George 00:03:45  Yeah. So the first strategy is 100% remarketing. You want to you want it. You want to okay. No, no. Just stop there. Actually, no. You want to find the best assets Asians to target, right? So you want to target assets that are importantly retail ready? Right. There needs to be a track record that they do well. Because with PPC someone searched for your product to see it and they’ve clicked on your product. So they’ve shown high interest. Right. So if they don’t purchase going down this process, there’s something wrong. There’s a conversion issue here. So there might be some issues with your listing. There might be some issues of your pricing. There might be some issues with the reviews you’ve got. That needs to be sorted out first. So you need to very carefully choose the right products to promote. Once you’ve figured out which products you’re going to promote, so you want to look at okay, what’s getting a good volume of sales.

George 00:04:32  What’s got a good amount of traffic? You want to have at least 5000 impressions, no less on an A given Asin, because that shows a month days. That’s showing you. Yeah, that’s showing you there’s a pool of interested people who see your listing on a monthly basis. So that’s already going to give you some, some kind of foundation work in terms of here’s some easy money we can pick up, okay. As a start. So you start remark.

Josh 00:04:59  Yeah. So let’s let’s break that down. Right. Because I think this is super important DSP is not your strategy to just increase sales for something that is not performing very well. I think what you’re saying here, strategy number one, is look at your data. You need products that are generating at least 5000 impressions per month. Okay. And then if I heard you correctly, George, you want to make sure that your conversion rate is at least on par with that product category average, if not better. That’s when that that’s like your first criteria.

Josh 00:05:35  Just as important as it is picking a DSP agency, picking the right products from your product group or from your portfolio is just as important, correct?

George 00:05:47  Yeah. And you can you can cross-reference this through brand metrics on PPC so you can find out okay. What’s your what’s your conversion rate for the product and what is it. What’s it what is it. What is the category average. Now, if you’re a lot lower than a category average then there’s an issue there. So you need to kind of go there, spend the money and time fixing that and then look into DSP. Sorry, there’s just so much to do before you you even go into DSP, right? So once you’ve done that then once you’ve found a win, in essence, once you’ve found the good for you win. In essence, what you want to do is you want to remarket you want to target those who have viewed the product and those who haven’t purchased. Right. And you want to target those who haven’t purchased your product and those who haven’t purchased other people’s products.

Josh 00:06:27  So you turn on so you’re turning on two different types of retargeting. You’re turning on retargeting for your own assignees, and then you’re retargeting your competitors assignees that have not yet bought. Correct.

George 00:06:40  No no, no. So so you’re creating two audiences. So you’ve got an audience of those who have viewed your product, but you’ve also got an audience of those who have, who have purchased your product and purchased any one of your competitors products. Then within that campaign, you just tell Amazon, hey, I want to target these people, but I want to make sure I exclude this audience, okay. And when you do that, it makes sure that your ads appear right.

Josh 00:07:04  That makes sense. That makes sense. What would be strategy number two? Let’s say you got that retargeting setup working properly. What do you then add to the go up the funnel from there.

George 00:07:14  I think it’s cross-sell the cross-sell. So go into brand metrics and brand metrics and no brand analytics sorry. Then go into market basket analysis.

George 00:07:25  Take all the assets there. That’s data already given to us by Amazon. They perform incredibly well. So this used to be at the bottom of our build sheet. But consistently the results have been so good we put it higher up in the SOP. So this is something you build straight off the remarketing. And they tend to do well. They tend to have a higher audience especially you need to brand sales as well. So so go down that route build there. Now once you’ve built this out, go back to your remarketing audience. Put that through overlap reports and find other audiences that you can build that have an affinity score of over five. Now Overlap Reports is only available on overlap reports. It’s only available on DSP right now. But I can see this coming into display ads, so have a look out for that when it does come through. It’s a really powerful tool you can use. And I just want to mention Josh as well. I only found this out at the prosper show in Vegas this, this year.

George 00:08:18  But, apparently there’s rumors about the roadmap of display ads basically being able to do everything you can do on DSP. So Amazon is trying to it’s trying to get it into that place. Now the question is you can wait for that. But that could be a year or two years down the line. Do you really want to wait that long and like leave everything on the table here? And that’s something for you to decide. But I just wanted to also throw that in there. So that’s the second thing. So you build out the cross, cross-sell campaigns where you’re you target in assets from the market basket analysis, so you can target everyone who’s purchased those particular assets. Right. As one audience. And you can also target those who have viewed those particular assets. That’s likely to see less conversions but a higher reach. Yeah. No that’s that’s that’s what you do. And then what you want to then do is you want to then create bespoke Ace and target ace campaigns. So you want to look at the assets that you’re targeting of your competitors on PPC that you’re doing right now.

George 00:09:13  And you want to advertise those who are performing well within display ads. So and then you can go really refine. So we had one one company that sold stores. And we would go as far as, okay, find every yellow stool that’s been sold on Amazon and advertise your our yellow stool. Find every red stool that’s been advertised on Amazon and target our red stool. So we’re really pushing the exact product or the exact size people are looking at looking for. So that’s what you would do with regular products. Now if you have a subscribe and save type of product, then, what you want to do is you want to target everyone who has purchased your Asin. You want to target everyone who. So you want to create a few audiences here. So this is slightly more complicated. So you want to target anyone who has purchased your Asin in the last year. You want to exclude anyone who has purchased your Asin in the last, let’s say, 60 days. So they’ve purchased in the past, but they haven’t purchased right recently.

George 00:10:13  And now you can also exclude anyone who is in your in your subscriber save model. So you’re excluding anyone who hasn’t subscribed. They have purchased your product and they might be likely to purchase again. But it’s just been some time. They tend to convert very well. Now you can add additional feature here. You can go into a tool like nozzle right. And nozzle will tell you the average window of when someone tends to purchase your product. Again. And this varies very again, it’s been very heavy data. Data driven. And you can find the exact information. So it could be 52 days. It could be 15 days, it could be 30 days. And if you’re selling supplements, if you’re selling a 30 day supplement range, you want to target those who purchased 20 days ago because they’re probably going to want to top up soon. It’s a little gentle reminder to tell them to do that, so they tend to do really well. Subscribe and save products. Now you can take it a step further, and you can target everyone who’s purchased any of your competitors assigns of the same supplement 60 days ago or 30 days ago, and they’re probably going to need to top up again.

George 00:11:17  So they’re likely that you know that they’re into the product. They know they they want to buy vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D. Yeah. Turmeric supplements right. And you can advertise your product so it doesn’t get more tailored and relevant than that. So supplement brands do. If you’re a supplement brand and you’re doing over 2 million a year, you need to get on DSP. It is a it is a no brainer that is.

Josh 00:11:41  Those are some wicked smart strategies. And I think you can see the power of using all of that data to laser, target and serve up your ad to the right person at the exact right time. I mean, that’s the power of what DSP allows us to do. Well, George, as we wrap up this episode, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three strategies and tactics that I would recommend our listeners take advantage of. But George, let me know if you think I’m missing something. Number one is if you’re not currently utilizing DSP, start learning more about it.

Josh 00:12:20  I would probably start there, right? But if you’re already familiar with DSP, then the number one action item that you need to do is you need to go vet the agency that you’re going to work with because yeah, your three options are either go have Amazon manage your DSP ads, which how fun does that sound or to work with a certified partner that actually knows and cares about your business, right? And then third, there’s a do it yourself solution, which I think would be a little bit more challenging, than people are looking for right now. But those are your three options. So number one, that the agency before you, you know, sign up to work with them because it’s almost like a marriage like this is something that you’re signing up for the long haul. And it’s not going to be easy to unravel this. If that’s something you decide, this isn’t the agency you’re going to work with. Action item number two is if you already are working with an agency or you just started, then the first action item that you need to do is get really detailed with your data, okay? You need to understand which products DSP is going to work for, because DSP is not going to work for those products that have a low number of impressions per month, they’re not really going to work as well.

Josh 00:13:37  If you don’t have an I don’t know. Would you say a higher average order value, George? Like if you have products in the $1,012 range, is DSP really the right fit for them?

George 00:13:47  It depends. If it’s a high impulse product and there’s there’s there’s a good volume going through it. There. We have seen it work at times okay.

Josh 00:13:55  But most importantly I think it comes back to that data. Do you have enough impressions coming through? The higher the better. And then secondly is your conversion rate above the market average right. Those are your kind of two pre qualifiers to say yeah if I turn on DSP this is just pouring gasoline on top of the fire. The last strategy is if you’ve already got your retargeting setup right, and you already know your products that could benefit from pouring gasoline on the fire, then keep moving up the funnel. But do it methodically. And I think that’s the most important takeaway from DSP in this conversation today is this isn’t just lit everything up at once. This is.

Josh 00:14:37  Start with retargeting. See what’s working. See what ads. See which Asians are performing really well. Then layer it up. Keep moving up the funnel and press the rewind button. Because George walked us through some four different actionable strategies that you could implement to keep moving up the funnel, targeting your competitors actions for people that haven’t actually bought those or purchasing, you know, or advertising cross-selling related products right from your market basket analysis. See what type of products people are buying alongside together, and then serve those up with people that have recently purchased those products. Like, that’s the power of DSP. So those are my three takeaways. George, is there anything else that you would add to summarize this all up?

George 00:15:23  You’ve done so well mate. Perfect summary there.

Josh 00:15:27  Now George, this has been a fantastic episode. You have dropped a lot of knowledge. I think people are going to need to push the rewind button. Slow down and take a lot of notes here. But George, where can people reach out to you so that they could tap into your network if they see, hey, Georgia’s got some wicked smart strategies.

Josh 00:15:45  I would love for him just to take over all of my DSP and start implementing everything that he talked about today. Where should people find you?

George 00:15:53  Yeah. So, so I’m the founder of Clear Ads. So if you were to search clear ads on Google or if you go to clear so clear ads. Co.Uk you go on our website, fill in the form, they tend to all go past me. It will tend tends to be George Roberts who, will pick up those, those, those inquiries. But if there’s anything that kind of anyone wants to speak to me about something, I’m more than happy to just jump on the call and talk about it, too. So that’s the best way. George Morris is my name. You can find me on Facebook as well and add me as a friend.

Josh 00:16:26  Awesome, I love that, and thank you for the wisdom that you shared today, George, and thanks for joining us.

George 00:16:32  No worries. Thank you for having me. Josh.