Mansour Norouzi, Partner at Incrementum Digital and a mastermind behind scaling 7- and 8-figure brands on Amazon. He’s helped brands crush it across multiple distribution channels and knows how to unlock maximum value from each marketplace. If you’re looking to supercharge your growth, you’ll want to hear this one.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Mansour Norouzi, partner at Incrementum Digital and Amazon advertising expert. Mansour shares his journey from civil engineering to Amazon success, then delves into advanced Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) strategies. He explains how AMC enables brands to analyze customer journeys, create targeted and lookalike audiences, and optimize ad campaigns. The discussion covers retargeting, brand tailored promotions, and using analytics tools to measure campaign impact. Listeners gain actionable insights on leveraging AMC and Amazon’s latest advertising features to boost sales and outpace competitors.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  What was their first exposure to the brand so that you can understand, hey, this is actually what’s like attracting demand generation for your listings and for your brand. That to me is what you highlighted. So it’s like if auto campaigns, let’s just assume if auto campaigns are are like the first bite at the apple for whatever reason for your brand. Like that’s people’s first exposure to your brand. Well, guess what happens if you decide to turn off auto campaigns because you heard it at some conference that auto campaigns are bad, right? Well, now you’re shooting yourself in the foot because that was people’s first interaction with you.

Intro 00:00:41  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.

Josh Hadley 00:00:54  Struggling to know the best way to optimize your Amazon ad campaigns with all the recent changes. And do you want to know the latest tools and levers inside of Seller Central to grow your sales? Well, today’s guest has managed over $100 million in Amazon ad spend and knows exactly how to crack that code on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:01:14  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley. I have scaled my own brand from 0 to 8 figures in sales, and now my mission is to take it to over nine figures in sales. On my journey to nine figures, I bring you unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael E Gerber, author of The Myth, and Stephen Pope from My Amazon Guy. Today’s guest is Mansour Norouzi’s partner at Incrementum Digital, and he is a mastermind behind scaling seven and eight figure brands on Amazon. He’s helped brands crush it across multiple distribution channels and knows how to unlock maximum value from each Marketplace. If you’re looking to supercharge your growth, you’ll want to hear this one. Welcome to the show! Mansour.

Mansour 00:02:05  Very excited to be here.

Josh Hadley 00:02:08  I’m excited to have you on the show. I know you and I met at the Billion Dollar Seller summit in Iceland, and, I was impressed with everything you were sharing about AMC at the time and just the different ways you were telling people like, get into AMC and how you were utilizing it, like, just super, like super smart.

Josh Hadley 00:02:29  So I’m happy to have you on the show. Mansour, give me just a quick, brief background of, you know, what led you to becoming a partner there at Incrementum Digital?

Mansour 00:02:41  Yes, sure. Well, my background is in civil engineering. Actually, I have master’s in civil engineering, and then I moved to Canada in 2015. Oh, man. Has been ten years now. I’m Canadian An Iranian. So I’ve got my citizenship. Then I moved here. I started doing work as a construction manager related to my field. But there was something missing, and I wanted to find something more flexible that is not reliant on the location. So I had that location. Freedom. I started searching and finally ended up with selling on Amazon. Okay, this is cool. Let’s let’s try this in. I would say end of 2018. Yes. End of 2018. Early 2019 I learned about Amazon. I started my first brand, which to this day I have it, but it’s a low seven figure business.

Mansour 00:03:38  That kind of it’s an autopilot and it is just running. So that happened. Plus, in 2020 I decided I’m like, okay, I’m going to go all in Amazon. I’m tired of construction. So I quit and I wasn’t ready to be honest. Like I’m like, what I’m getting from this brand is nowhere close to what I was getting from construction manager. But anyway, I’m like, okay, let’s just break the bridges and see what happens. I went to few events, got to know earlier on, and by the time I was posting about Amazon advertising on Facebook, there was no LinkedIn wasn’t that popular. Then I was posting on Facebook, different groups. I go to Austin for conversation 2019. I don’t know if you still use an authority. You heard about mini chat? Have you heard about many chat?

Josh Hadley 00:04:31  Yes, definitely.

Mansour 00:04:32  Exactly. So that was the conversation 2019 I got to know later on and a few months later I joined incrementalism. So there were ten people at a time claim.

Mansour 00:04:47  He asked me after a few months to become partner to become Director of Advertising. Fast forward to today. We have more than 50 people managing more than five 6 million per month, and I’m still the director of advertising there. Cool to see how when you join with the company, you grow with them. You are in that path. And that growth has been amazing for me. I guess 30 years ago, four years ago, Liron reached out and told me, I don’t know why we never offered you, but you want to be a partner. I’m like, sure, why not? And that is the story of that. We have helped many brands on Amazon last year. I would say the brands we work with, they generated around 900 million in revenue. And also I launched the supplement brand, in 2024, in January 2024. That is great. And my goal is I passed 1 million. My goal is to hit 2 million, hopefully in less than 12 months trailing to 2 million. So that’s a.

Mansour 00:05:53  the goal of my mind in the supplement side, which I love that game on. Like I’ve realized that I love cpg, cpg game, so I’m having fun there.

Josh Hadley 00:06:05  I love it. Well, I love that you have in-depth and experience in the trenches working with so many different brands. You said, what, 800, $900 million in revenue? Like, yeah, you see what the top brands are doing right now and you’re seeing the different tools, the levers that they’re pulling. And that’s what I’m actually really excited to have you on the show for today is like, you get a peek behind the curtain of a lot of massive brands. And so for you to be able to share, hey, these are what the big guys are doing. And this is what I would recommend any seven figure seller to be implementing in their business. That’s what I’m excited to dive into today. So, Mansour, I know we’re going to be talking about a lot of the recent updates or tools changes that Amazon has provided to us, whether it be in Seller central or in the advertising console.

Josh Hadley 00:06:57  What’s really interesting is that things have been changing very, very quickly, and Amazon’s pushed out a lot of new features with without really like giving a whole lot of advance notice or even training. And my opinion is like not many sellers even a know that they’re there. But be I would argue, probably like 90% of sellers are not utilizing these tools today. And I think what you shared with me earlier is like, but these are the tools that the big guys are using, and if you’re not using them now, you’re going to fall behind. So Mansour, what are some of those tools that people are not using that the big guys are that’s kind of leaving them behind.

Mansour 00:07:40  Yeah. Okay. Amazing. And to your point 100% agree. Like Amazon keeps releasing all these tools, which they have been amazing in giving that first party. They’re releasing data. Compared to a few years ago, we actually didn’t have any. Now we have so much that you’re like, okay, how I’m going to use this? What is this data? What is that data I feel like Amazon has been doing has been doing a great job in terms of giving the data for today.

Mansour 00:08:06  We are going to go over all these tools that I have a note here to what order to go with. But we will start with Amazon advertising. And I would say as you guys know, Amazon Marketing Cloud has been hyped and everyone talking about. And one good thing happened in in Iceland. Josh, if you remember, I was giving people the directions on how to get access to Amazon Marketing Cloud. Guess what? A few weeks ago, actually, Amazon sometime ago released this Amazon Marketing Cloud for everyone. So you go to your account, I’m going to also share my screen. So we could for people who are watching on YouTube, they could see this as well. So if you go to your Amazon advertising cloud, to Advertising console under Measurement and Reporting, everyone has access to Amazon Marketing Cloud now, which is awesome. And this is the most comprehensive and complex report that Amazon has released so far. And the reason is, the way we use Amazon Marketing Cloud is that there are two ways to look at it.

Mansour 00:09:19  One is getting insights. Second is getting audience. Both of them are amazing audiences, more actionable. And I’m going to give you just a few examples of how to use it. Now, as we have not that I could talk about Amazon Marketing Cloud for hours, but I’ll give you just a few notes and it might be a bit overwhelming because for Amazon Marketing Cloud it is a query based. So when you get want to get the reports complex reports. You need to write a query, but Amazon has made it easy in different ways. One recently actually this assistant they added just recently I’ve just seen it, which is AI, you can ask. It’s going to come up with answers, but apart from that, if you go to the use cases, you can see all these reports that Amazon actually telling you. What are the use cases for Amazon Marketing Cloud. And also when you go to the projects and measurements there are some templates for audience and for measurements. If you if it is very overwhelming you don’t know.

Mansour 00:10:31  What that how to query. You don’t need to write code or anything. You just go use the template. And they have great templates that you could use and get insights. Now in terms of measurements, I’m going to give you a few ways we are using it. And the most important ones because it could be 100 ways. So many templates, plus anything that you want to query. You could, you could. It’s just limitless. If you can make a query. You can create the content.

Josh Hadley 00:11:02  Monster I love that. I am super excited to dive into this because there has been so many people talking about, hey, use Amazon Marketing Cloud. However, as you highlighted here, it’s not the easiest tool to use because it’s SQL based. Right. And again, how many entrepreneurs are like data superpower heroes? You know what I mean. Like there’s very few like data nerds out there that are that are the entrepreneurs. Typically it’s like, I don’t want to worry about the data side, but there is so much value that comes from this.

Josh Hadley 00:11:39  An Amazon marketing cloud truly has changed the game. So Mansour, with that being said, what are you encouraging your brands and what are the like? How are you inviting people and what’s the best way to utilize Amazon Marketing Cloud today?

Mansour 00:11:57  Great. Great question. Number one for measurement is that we could see customer journey. Sure. You guys have heard about this for customer journey. What it means is that you could see all the touchpoints of the customers with your ads. So they saw a sponsored brand video. They saw a sponsor product. They clicked on sponsor display and purchase so you could map all these different customers journey to see what are. Because when you are creating this report, which is one of the templates, then you creating this report, it’s going to show you that this path which you started with the sponsor display, then sponsor brand video, then the sponsor product. Here is the number of customers that went over this path. Here is the number of purchases that led from this path. So you have the purchase rate for each path that is going to show you that.

Mansour 00:12:58  What is the customer journey and what are the highest purchase rate customers journey. How we use this is that for instance, if we have a we see that. And by the way, we are we see highest purchase rate when customers are exposed to all of our ad types sponsored product sponsor, brand sponsor, display and sponsored video. So the way we look at it is that you see, okay, define with which path is generating the highest, purchase rate. And we decide, okay, things like this is working the best. Let’s double down on this. And when you combine this with audience creation, now It’s the place we get the highest return. Meaning, if you see, I’m just going to make it. Make this up. Sponsor. Display. Sponsor. Product. Sponsor. Brand gives us highest purchase rate. What we do, we create audience from the audience section that I’m going to quickly talk about. Customers who saw our sponsor product and sponsor brand. What they haven’t seen our sponsor display ad, what we do with this, we take this audience and now guess what? You could use these audiences that you create from the AMC in your sponsored ads.

Mansour 00:14:23  We take this to a sponsor display. In the sponsor display, you create a campaign. You say, go after these customers because we know these customers haven’t seen the sponsor display. We know the purchase rate goes up when they see all of these three ad types, but they haven’t seen the sponsor display. So we put our ad in front of those customers. This is just one example of how we see this customer journey. The other thing is, Josh, for instance, you can see here asynchronous overlap for upselling. When you create this template it’s going to take time here. That’s why I’m not creating it. When you create this Amazon is going to give you a table that here are the customers that purchase a product a what percentage of those customers purchase product B from your brand if they purchase product B, what percentage purchase product sees? It shows you that what is this combination? So you could easily go upsell your product. You see, oh 20% of customers who purchase A they purchasing B and C as well if you have a big catalog.

Mansour 00:15:30  So you make sure that you’re creating audience that purchase that product A and you push them the product C and B with advertising in front of them to increase your order value because based on data, you see this is the highest overlap in terms of yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:15:50  This is already super helpful. So what used to be Amazon like? The only way you could find like what products people were frequently purchasing together, you’d have to go to like your detail page on Amazon and see if they even had that feature available on the detail page. That said, customers that bought this also buy this and this, but sometimes it wasn’t even your brand that they were purchasing with, but now you’re being able to see. And plus now those are just sponsored listings. So it’s not even helpful information. But now you’re saying like an Amazon marketing cloud, you can see a more visual funnel of like if people buy this, they will also tend to buy this from your brand as well. But I think the important thing to to note is that it’s telling you what was their first exposure to the brand so that you can understand, hey, this is actually what’s.

Josh Hadley 00:16:44  Like attracting demand generation for your listings and for your brand. That to me is what you highlighted. So it’s like if auto campaigns, let’s just assume if auto campaigns are are. Like the first bite at the apple for whatever reason for your brand. Like that’s people’s first exposure to your brand. Well, guess what happens if you decide to turn off auto campaigns because you heard it at some conference that auto campaigns are bad, right? Well, now you’re shooting yourself in the foot because that was people’s first interaction with you. So now that’s got to go somewhere else. So I think it is very, very important that people actually like the insights that you can glean from this. It’s not about just having the data. It’s being able to gain insights. So and so maybe can you help us maybe show maybe some of the reports and like how to identify the insights that actually drive business decisions from Amazon Marketing Cloud for sure.

Mansour 00:17:43  Actually, I wanted to add another use case that you were talking about eight nine figure businesses using EMC.

Mansour 00:17:49  There is one use case that not all brands doing. And what is that? It is bringing your DTC data into the AMC. So what we do is that we bring all your information from your website. We input that into AMC. And guess what happens now? You could make a journey of customers who went to your website but they didn’t purchase. They came to Amazon and purchased or they come to Amazon. They checked their product and they then purchased from the website. So you could build this customer journey between your website and Amazon, because that’s the question that we usually have. And there are many brands selling if you are running and on to your website. I’m dealing with that myself with my sublime brand. I drive traffic to my website, but I’m like, why is the purchase of low? The conversion is low, but to some extent those customers, they go to Amazon search and purchase your product. So with this you can bridge this gap and understand that okay, what is going on to my customer journey between my website and here, hopefully at some point in the future with all these multi channels, different channels, we could bridge the gap.

Mansour 00:19:13  The only downside I would say, is that when you are bringing data from your website, Amazon won’t be able to match 100% of those customers. It’s going to usually see like 80% based on the emails and everything that they have, to 80%. They could match the customers visitors from your websites to Amazon customers. So it’s not like 100% everything is there. But that is a very best and advanced use case that nine figures brand that have higher traffic on their website. You are going to understand better what’s going on with the traffic at your driving.

Josh Hadley 00:19:49  So you’re saying like basically it’s like you’re marketing efficiency ratio, right? You’re mur.

Mansour 00:19:54  Actually.

Josh Hadley 00:19:55  So to understand, like, hey, if I’m spending on Facebook ads, but the Facebook ad is going to my my D to C website, but I know there’s a halo effect onto Amazon. I just don’t know what that halo effect is. You’re saying Mansour the smartest minds in e-commerce, those eight and nine figure brands, they’re using AMC to basically truly understand like what that Murr ratio truly is for them.

Josh Hadley 00:20:23  Exactly. Yes. Love it. What else?

Mansour 00:20:26  What else? Let’s go to a few of use cases of audiences. There is this report, this template, high value audiences. So what it does, it gives you. It makes different segments for your customers and based on different percentiles of how valuable those customers for you are. For instance, 95 to 100 percentiles have the highest value. And as you can see here, the average product sales is $120. Right. And so the first use case you could just click on this create lookalike. By the way you could filter and say if you have a big catalog you could go even drill down to a specific basin. You could say for this product, show me my high value customers right now, there’s no filter. It’s in brand level. And when you select, let’s say I’m selecting top 30% of my customers, they are the highest value customers. You can create a looking like audience to these people because, you know, if these are high value customers, lookalike audience Customers will be valuable for me as well.

Mansour 00:21:37  You create audience, take it to the sponsored product, and you have higher multipliers for the bits for these customers because you know they are most likely to purchase from you and have a high value. They will be loyal customers to you. Come back, especially if you have a consumable product. This is a great approach and even not consumable product because it’s just a lookalike audience. So this is one approach that you can use. Your existing customers, create a lookalike audience, target them with different type of ads. Very valuable, very good. Just make sure you create a lookalike audience. Amazon has very similar clothes or whatever. Go with the first option. It is closely similar. If otherwise, it’s going to be very proud that abroad that you might not see the results. So that is that. And Josh here in the same time there is this missed opportunities. This is incredible. And this is one of the best use cases that we have for all of pretty much clients. It shows that here are the people, customers who had a detailed page view in this time period, but they didn’t purchase 30,000 users for this.

Mansour 00:22:53  Here is 5000 customers added to cart but didn’t purchase. So what do we do here? We create audience from this add to cart, but didn’t purchase the lowest hanging fruit for you guys. You don’t know how good this performs. Add this to your campaign and usually my recommendation is don’t try to add this to your existing campaigns because you might mess up with the performance. What I would recommend is that create a new campaign specifically for this. Create a new campaign and add these audiences on top of your Placements give them a boost in vital adjustments. So what that means is that you could have a low bit, but you are saying, Amazon, that if a customer from this segment is searching add to cart, then purchase. Show me higher. Increase my bid so you get in front of them, target them with the sponsor display and the sponsor display. With the sponsor brand, the sponsor product, you could add a bid adjustment multiply. So you could say increase my bid for 50% for these customers.

Mansour 00:24:01  For sponsored display, you could directly target this customers and say go in front of those customers if they are in different product detail pages. If they are different pages on Amazon, go in front of them, show my ads. So try to target them with different ad types. You can see here customers who did branded searches. This is actually a good one as well. They have done a branded searches. They have searched for your brand but they haven’t purchased, so get in front of them again. Just make sure you gotta you have a threshold for how many users, which is 1500 for creating direct customers from there. If you want to create a lookalike audience, your seed audience should be at least 500. If you don’t have enough in this case for vicious, for instance, it is 500. I can’t directly create this go longer time period like three months six months to increase that, the total users to pass the threshold. So it doesn’t just feel of good use cases that you can have.

Josh Hadley 00:25:05  I love this.

Josh Hadley 00:25:06  All right man, so or so are you saying I can create these audiences and maybe I don’t know if you can maybe do a short demo for us of like how to actually do this, but like if you create the audience, where do you where do you turn on those ads for that audience? And I especially, I think like the lowest hanging fruit, as you mentioned, is like retargeting ads to people that have already added to cart but have not checked out like retargeting ads are are stupid. Simple like obviously anybody should be doing that. what are the ad types? Like you’re not are you running sponsored ad campaigns or is it sponsored brand or is it sponsored display? because my follow up question, sponsored display has really bad metrics. At least last time I was looking at it where it’s like it’s more just attributing, like, hey, it showed up on the page. They didn’t necessarily click on it, but we’re attributing the sale because like we showed your ad on this page, so checking, even though you have no idea if anybody actually even saw that your product was even on that page.

Josh Hadley 00:26:11  Right.

Mansour 00:26:11  So no good call out. I’ll talk about that. Let’s start from the first information. Let’s just like create one here. You click in Add to cart. I have enough in my tool. It’s more than 1500. So we could create the audience. If you want to drill down to any product, you could drill down Create Audience and you click here. In Create Audience, you get to a new tab and it says, as you can see it says what exposure type do you want? Do you want to just go after customers who I’ve seen who have been at exposed or not at exposed? In this case, I’m like, no, I don’t care if they have added to cart. I want to be in front of them no matter if they have seen or I do or not. If you want to choose the product again, it’s asking here. So let’s go in brand level. I call out a few things about that as well. You select your advertiser, which is your brand.

Mansour 00:27:04  And here is where I was mentioning we don’t want to create lookalike audience. Actually I have seen some people make this mistake. They create lookalike audience to people who are added to cart. I’m like, why would you do that? Do you want to bring more add to cart that they don’t purchase? No, you shouldn’t do that. But if you remember I mentioned about your high value customers always go with similar more similar. is the clothes don’t go with other ones. They are so broad. If you are creating lookalike audience, go with the most similar. But in this case you want to create exact customers from this segment, which is rule these audiences. Name it and it says do you want to adjust the date meaning when it passes? Do you want to look at trailing three months or no, a fixed three months, which I will go always with. Yes. Meaning we want to update, we want to go trailing, create audience and boom, you have you have your audience. As simple as that.

Josh Hadley 00:27:59  Okay. So we have our audience.

Mansour 00:28:01  Then you have then what? Good question. So you could add these audience layer on top of sponsor, product sponsor display and sponsor brand, all of them. Now I’m going to actually go to campaign manager to show you that there you could add it for sponsored product and sponsor brand. It is like placement. You see how the ad placement multipliers. If you go to bid adjustments for those segments of audiences, you could add. You add your audience here. Change your audience. You can add your audience and say boost the bid for the segment for 20%, 30%, 100%. So you add it from here. One thing that is really challenging as of now is that you could add one audience at a time here. So if I add the audience of Add to Cart, unfortunately I can’t add any other audiences to increase the bid. It’s just one which makes it difficult to scale, right? That’s that’s one downside. But it’s for here for sponsor. So meaning if I want to give you a bit more high level of what’s going on.

Mansour 00:29:12  So with the sponsored product, what we are doing, either we are we are having auto campaign or a keyword targeting or product targeting. So I’m saying that let’s say we have a sponsored product of keyboard targeting. If a customer is searched for ankle brace and if it is in my pool of audience, if they have added to cart my product but they haven’t purchased increased my bid for that customer. So when they are searching in the page, I am going to the tool for the auction with higher bid because that customer is in the segment that I have added it right to the adjustment. Same for the sponsor brand. You have your base bid in the campaign, but if the customer who is searching is in the pool of this audience that you have created, Amazon is going to apply the bid adjustment in the auction. They are going to put the auction with that bid adjustment. But did you have a question?

Josh Hadley 00:30:10  I was just going to say so is like, are you creating a specific campaign? And that campaign is is it only being delivered to that specific audience or is it being delivered to like so let’s say we create a new sponsored product campaign, right? A normal like campaign.

Josh Hadley 00:30:30  It’s one exact keyword. Just to make it simple, we have our regular bid that we’re going to set up. But I can add my new audience to this if I add my new audience to this campaign at that point, does that new campaign that we created only get delivered to that audience that I just uploaded, or is it like, hey, no, it’s going to go to everybody, but you have a bid adjustment for your specific audience where you can increase it. So I’m just trying to understand, like, are you telling Amazon only serve this ad to people that are in my audience? Or are you telling Amazon, run this keyword campaign? But if somebody is in my audience, I want you to. I’m willing to pay even more options on that placement.

Outro 00:31:21  Option to do.

Mansour 00:31:23  Option. No, it’s not option one. It’s sponsor display. Is that option? I’ll talk about it. But it is option two. That is why I said create a new campaign. And in this case, you can.

Mansour 00:31:35  How you could deal with that to make sure it is more toward people who are in your audience, which your base fit in the campaign for the exact low and with higher bid adjustments. So you are seeing the way is happening is that as a general rule, your bid is low, so you are showing up in different places. But for those audiences, you get to the bit that you want. The way you think about this lower bit higher bid adjustments for that add to cart. So kind of you are being served to those audiences. Doesn’t mean it’s just then you show up in other places as well. But for sponsor display, you add this audience directly as a target. So you can create a sponsor display at the audience and say go just in front of them. The sponsor display is more targeted just to serve for those, but the sponsor product and sponsor brand know you are just increasing your bid adjustments for them.

Josh Hadley 00:32:37  Awesome. So my question to you, my answer is like what’s working best right now? Let’s say I have an add to cart audience, right? And I’m trying to retarget cart abandonment.

Josh Hadley 00:32:49  Basically. What’s the best strategy? Is it sponsored brand sponsored display or sponsored product campaigns?

Mansour 00:32:57  It says sponsored product campaign. Plus I would say we usually we talked we could talk about brand promotion. That is my one of my favorite tools. I run every segment of brand tailored promotions. If you want to kind of talk about that as well for all of my products. So if you think about this, you have you are shown in front of add to cart this audience that they haven’t purchased, they added to cart. You have a segmenting brand tailored promotion giving them 510% discount. This combination, the increase in your conversion rate that you see is amazing. So I’m saying if you are running coupon code for the segment of Added to Cart from Brand promotion, the sponsored product sponsor display will work the best because you show in front of them. Plus they see the coupon code. So these two we are seeing the best results. And I have tested this with one brand. Actually this brand the way we did it is that.

Mansour 00:33:59  We talk about customer loyalty as well. There are so many truths that we could talk about. In the customer loyalty tab. You could see the dropoff from your add to cart, right? It says there’s many people added to cart. Here’s the drop off that didn’t purchase. We started running Brand Taylor promotion coupon. We started AMC and after one week of running this in the drop off, we see how much we see, I think 20% improvement. Less. Less drop off in our from our add to cart. This combination has been very amazing for us.

Josh Hadley 00:34:36  I love that all right monster. So I think this may be a perfect segue into brand tailored promotions and the customer loyalty tabs. Is there anything else that we haven’t covered with AMC before we jump ship here?

Mansour 00:34:49  No AMC, we covered it. But there’s one tool here. I feel like people not using this enough, which is brand metrics. Have you have you used brand metrics?

Josh Hadley 00:35:01  I have it’s been a minute, but I, I am aware of brand metrics.

Josh Hadley 00:35:04  So this is in the Amazon advertising console still.

Mansour 00:35:08  Yes. This is one of the tools that we usually when we talk with our brands and they want to understand what’s happening with their market share, how they are doing compare in different parts of the funnels, how they are doing compared to market. In the subcategory level, we come here. So for instance this is an enterprise product, right? You could change where did I go. So you could go to change category. And it’s going to show you every subcategory that you are in. So in this case I’m going to go right away. They have subcategory of ankle breaks I’m showing this in Safari is kind of messed up but this is the purchase. So awareness consideration purchase. We see different part of the funnel for this subcategory of ankle brace. This is the first of all shows how you are performing compared to previous week. And it has the weekly and monthly. But what I love is this chart shoppers over time. Here it shows you based on shopper count, so you could see the flow of the market for category median for category top and your shoppers.

Mansour 00:36:20  So the questions that you answer from here for ankle braces that in our brand. First of all are we aligned with the category. So if the category if you are looking at category top is our change in the shoppers align with them more meaning we move parallel with them. So there are two things I want to do and see. Either of you are parallel with them, which is okay, we are moving with the market or we are improving, right? We are. Our shoppers are improving. If I see something like this, I don’t like it. Look at here. This is a good example. The category top from this week to this week they increase right? It means they are having better sales. Our shopper went down. So kind of shows me we had some issue in this. Something happened. They did something wrong which I think we increased the price or something like that happen. But this is a place that for many brands, we check here to understand how they are roughly doing compared to the market and the changes that they have.

Mansour 00:37:26  So just shows the shopper count and they do the percentage change here as well, that what does that percentage change compared to the first week here? This is amazing. Have you ever used this.

Josh Hadley 00:37:40  Josh I have I have looked at it and I think there’s like a conversion rate feature to is there.

Mansour 00:37:46  Then you click here you have the conversion rate. This is another one that we always use if the brands want to scale, if they want to push something. We check here to see this conversion rate for our brand. How stacks against the category, median and top. Usually if you want to scale you say okay, are we better than category median? If you are better so you have a chance. But if you see that here is 12% for category median, if we were at 10% if a brand comes to us and says, I want to push with that, with the ad, I’m like, no, you don’t want to do that. You want first to see what is causing the slow conversion rate.

Mansour 00:38:23  Let’s look at your listing. Let’s look at your images. SEO before raising money in advertising. Because yeah, we would be able to push, but probably we won’t see good results because our conversion rate is bad. And one thing that not enough people are using this sales index. This is I love this what it shows that I’m just going to read what sales index is. Sales index quantifies the amount of orders your brand has generated relative to your most competitive peers. So in this case for this brand is 85. You are performing better than 85% of the brands like yours in the category. This shows quantifies how you are doing in that subcategory. This brand has declined for so many reasons. They started increasing price. Now, I remember this was 95%. The way we look at it is that we look at different months, different time periods to see. Our goal is either to be the same or improve it. If you see this is declining, it means we are losing market share. So just to show you, I think if I go early in the by the way saying weekly, monthly, you can look at it, I think in February it’ll be very, very good.

Mansour 00:39:39  So 83, we were 89. We can see from here this is how we are looking at it to see, oh shoot, like there is something happening. This is one of the tools that we also use for diagnosing and understanding the market share.

Josh Hadley 00:39:56  Yeah I think that’s super smart. I think the only caveat is you need to make sure that because it’s just looking at the category level exclusively, right. So sometimes there are certain categories on Amazon where it’s like there’s actually a lot of, like, either substitute products or there’s a jumble of products that you’re like. These are like for like we’re comparing apples to oranges here. Have you been able to like, answer that question? Like where it’s like there’s a whole bunch of different products in this category. So this isn’t really telling me how I’m performing against my direct competition. Yeah, it’s at the category level, but there’s a lot of crap in that category.

Mansour 00:40:39  So that’s a very great callout. Actually, yes, that’s the issue with that. You had a call with the product manager for this tool.

Mansour 00:40:48  Their goal, which they are not here. As we can see they are mentioning to your most comparable tiers. So their goal is that really to look at your products and compare it to the right products. That’s the goal. And honestly, I don’t know if they have fixed it or not, but eventually that would be the goal that okay, this is my product. I am in a subcategory that there are different type of products. They are not all like mine, but their goal is just to make sure they narrow down to the products related to your product.

Outro 00:41:18  Yeah okay okay.

Josh Hadley 00:41:20  Great insights. All right. What else?

Mansour 00:41:22  So from there we talked about let’s look at the advertising scale, brand tailored promotions. I don’t know your experience, but for my own brand, I run every single one of these, segments right now. For instance, here.

Outro 00:41:40  This is so.

Josh Hadley 00:41:41  My answer. I’m actually very interested to have this conversation with you because I initially started using Brand Tailor Promotions, and then I’m in the camp that thinks that I think it’s a bunch of BS.

Josh Hadley 00:41:53  Here’s my theory, and I would love for you to either disprove it. Let’s have a good debate here. So my my argument for Brand Tailor promotions is that Amazon is not sending a they’re not sending an email or a push notification or any sort of messaging about your product. What they are saying, though, is if people if a customer who is senior your product, maybe they saw it today and then tomorrow they they maybe got busy yesterday and their kid interrupted them. You’re still shopping for that product today. You remembered. Oh, I want to go shop for that product. Well, now when you go back, you were going to go purchase that product anyways. You go back to it and now there’s a new shiny coupon code there and you’re like, I’m going to go claim this now, even though I was already going to purchase this and I’m going to claim it, I’m going to add it to cart, and I’m going to check out my theory is that, like you’re just diluting your margin by this because Amazon’s not aggressively like reminding people about your product.

Josh Hadley 00:43:04  It’s just if people happen to stumble upon your product again, you’re now giving them an extra discount, just as a courtesy to try to push them over the edge to check out. So that’s my theory that you’re just kind of giving up margin. If Amazon actually sent push notifications or had some pop up in the cart, or maybe resurfaced it to the top of their Amazon home page. I think it would be even more compelling, right? but for the fact that, like, well, your customer has to end up finding you, which means you need to run sponsored display campaigns, which you alluded to, or you need to run more product sponsored ads, in order to get people back there, which again, you’re spending more money. But again, maybe it’s a customer. You would not. That’s debatable. Right? Would they have actually come back? I don’t know. so that’s my that’s where I’m at. Mansour, tell me how you’re using it and, your your opinion.

Mansour 00:44:04  Oh, no.

Mansour 00:44:04  You are 100% correct in terms of Amazon is not actively putting notes or anything notification toward customers. But at the end of the day, the way I think about this is that one, we don’t have an answer to the question. If I didn’t have the coupon, would they have purchased or not? That’s the first. The second is that here we are looking at the new customer acquisition. Right. The goal of new customer acquisition and cart abandonment. This could be the same thing that the the what you mentioned that they have added to cart. They are going to come back and purchase. Why would I why would I add a coupon code. But I test it with this for exactly the same problem. And that’s where I saw that 20% improvement in drop offs. You had this 20% improvement in a drop off. So I can tell you that Josh no you got to run it. And I understand it could eat from your margin, but the way I think about this is that, I don’t know, I don’t have the answer to that question.

Mansour 00:45:08  I’d rather give 5% coupon code. And for me, I have a supplement brand. There are so many CPG brands that we work with. For them, for me isn’t a non brainer. I’m like. For me, the acquisition of this customer is very important. I don’t care if they wanted to purchase, they didn’t purchase no matter what. I want to bring this person to my brand because then after that I know that when they become a customer of me, my lifetime value is high and there are different ways that I can keep them in the loop. That is the reason we run it. So for CPG brands, I would say no question. I would go with all of them, like high potential new customers, high intent customer. You know how important the acquisition is in the CPG runs. But we go to brands that okay, there are not CPG brands. There is no repeat purchase. Should I run this or no. I’m just losing Profit by running giving coupon. I’m like, honestly, Josh, I don’t have a definite answer that how much of this will be, the hormone? How many of these people will come back and purchase from you? But I’d rather not risk it.

Mansour 00:46:21  I want to, okay, I’ll give you 5% coupon. Just come back. I want to, I want to sell my product to you. I have no problem with 5% coupon. The other thing that we gotta we got to consider is that the same customer, when you bring to your brand, if you have other products. Now you are getting that to the loop. That. Okay, you are in my brand. I know my brand. You have purchased from my product. The upside what I’m trying to say for me, upside is much higher than losing 5% from this customer because of because of running coupon to make sure I’m getting I understand where you’re coming from. Could be true, but for me that hasn’t been. I have thought about this. There hasn’t been any way to prove it, so I don’t know.

Josh Hadley 00:47:08  But you’re. And I like where you’re coming from. Like, if you have a consumable product. Right? Your biggest thing is, like, I just got to get people in the door, right? And if it gives up, if you give up an extra 5%.

Josh Hadley 00:47:20  Yeah. To your point. So what? Right. So I would say like if you’re just on the front end acquisition and you’re just making money selling a whole bunch of, like, random unrelated products, that’s where this strategy is. Maybe like, oh, maybe you want to keep those pennies, right? But if you have a true brand that I think you need to have, if you want to survive any commerce over the next 5 to 10 years, and you have other related products that you want to upsell them to, or it’s a consumable product, then just getting them in the door could be a big first step in them. You know, becoming a long a lifelong consumer, increasing your LTV. So I like that. Is there anything else you want to add? Because I want to make sure before we run up on time here we talk about Brand Taylor Promotions and then that customer loyalty tab, because I think those are two very underutilized tools. But I also think Brand Taylor Promotions is very underutilized.

Josh Hadley 00:48:18  So is there anything else that you want to talk about about Brand Taylor Promotions that you think, hey, the big guys are doing this. If you’re not doing X, Y, or Z here, you’re really missing out.

Mansour 00:48:28  Right. So you know, the as I mentioned, combining this with the audience targeting with AMC could be very helpful and very efficient. But pretty much we’re on all of these segments. One thing, by the way, if you have products that are related, this cross-selling is good. I, I don’t see and every brand I talk to honestly Josh I’m like, please run this. These are good. I have seen the results right now with this brand. I pushed them, they started running, but still there are some segments that he’s. My friend is not running every time I’m talking to him, I’m like. Run this. I’m telling you, I you can see the results. But cross-selling is good. Adding your product to make sure if they purchase from you, then the brand looks familiar for them.

Mansour 00:49:14  With the small coupon code, you could bring them sell other products. And one thing here is when you do this, add a specific product. I feel like most people go with add all products segment. They don’t look at specific products, they think it’s just a filter. But in reality the segments are different. Here is an example. In market customers, you didn’t have this when you were selecting add all products. So keep that in mind. The options start changing. View remarketing Carter marketing. We had it, but we use remarketing and in-market customers. We didn’t have it in the other option. Even in all of these segments, when you go with add a specific product, you see that different options. So I would say this is the place that I see some brands miss it because they don’t click here. They think it’s just a filter, but in reality the options are different.

Josh Hadley 00:50:12  Love it. And so at the end of the day, you can give as small as a 5% discount on there.

Josh Hadley 00:50:19  And it’s just going to give you a little like coupon badge right on the product detail page.

Outro 00:50:24  Correct.

Mansour 00:50:24  Exactly, exactly. And to your point, actually, I said measurement is difficult, but here it’s a good segway to how you could measure this. I don’t know why I didn’t mention it, but you’re on this for one week, two weeks. You go to your brand analytics, go to the customer journey. When I say customer loyalty, sorry, I mean customer journey analytics. So in customer journey analytics what Amazon is showing you they pass from awareness consideration intent to purchase. So here if you are listening in podcast in the awareness it shows all the category searches for the week 39 year, and it says that okay for your brand 166 people search your brand name. So you have your branded searches as well. Just keep that in mind. With branded searches, it’s just exact brand name because some products they have a specific name for, they come up with a name for the product. It doesn’t Amazon can’t identify those.

Mansour 00:51:23  It’s just a brand name itself, any combination of the brand name. So you see what brand search is happening. You can see even drop off from your brand searches. But for category, how many people in the category search? How many had a detailed view detail page? How many had a drop off? So here’s the first thing. Let’s say you run a judge in market brand promotion. You’re like, I don’t think it’s going to impact me. I don’t want to run it. I would say, okay, run that coupon code, do the calculation here. It will be something a bit edit manual. Calculate this. What percentage of CategoryChurch. Turn to view detail page. What percentage dropped off after a week? Two week. When you run this, calculate this percentage again. Do you see a list drop off after you running this? If you are seeing this drop off, it means okay, that coupon code is working. You might not be able to measure it exactly there, but here from customer Journey analytics with few calculations of different weeks, you see that added to cart.

Mansour 00:52:34  That is how I mentioned that right in the intent section added to cart, you run the coupon code, you might say I don’t want to run it because they add it to cart. Probably they will be back. I would challenge you, run it to a test and then make a decision. Because for this brand, when I run that, let’s say 5,053% drop off was before running the coupon code. David. Dropping off the event purchasing after running that 3% became some number like 45%. I’m just making up. I don’t remember it. 5%. I’m like, okay, this is working because this now I have less drop off in the add to cart segment of any coupon code you run. Actually, this customer journey is the best place to understand if you are seeing the results or not. Does that make.

Outro 00:53:25  Sense? Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:53:27  How was it? How does it work for like the category search though? Because like you’re not getting I guess if you run a brand tailored promotion, does it show up in the category search like on the detail? I thought the the coupon code only shows up on the detail page.

Josh Hadley 00:53:43  So really it wouldn’t necessarily impact somebody searching. The only.

Outro 00:53:47  Thing that.

Josh Hadley 00:53:48  Would change for your search would be like your main image, your price title. You know what I mean?

Mansour 00:53:53  I believe it is the product detail page, and there are some other placements that I remember. I read about this. I had a note about this that it shows in different places as well. It is not only product page, but to your point. I’ll go to double check. Honestly, I can’t recall that product in the page for sure showing up, but I believe there are different placements that that coupon could show up.

Outro 00:54:16  Okay, yeah, awesome.

Josh Hadley 00:54:18  But this is the place to like. This is where the data will tell you whether it’s working or not is what you’re saying.

Mansour 00:54:24  Yes, exactly. These drop offs at least from for sure from view detail page just right away. Go see what I for instance add to wishlist is one of the AMC audience segments that you have. Yeah, right. You could run that and see.

Mansour 00:54:41  Do you see any impact on this? Is it going down or not? These are really very like a very detailed analysis that you got to do. And they are very manual. But it could exactly show you what is happening. The other one is that like here, we always love looking at our customers, actually. So for some of the brands that we work with, they do all these off Amazon marketing and ads. So they want to see what’s happening to their brand, such as one of the places that we see is from here. So how many brands searches we have on Amazon here in the brand, in the customer journey analytics. So we see that trend of branded searches, because the one thing usually happens when you’re on DSP for our clients, the idea of how to show them, especially in the awareness part, it is very difficult to show what the results are because they realize it’s not important either. In this campaign, we just want people to know about our product. So you need to come up with the metrics to show that CVR This is awareness you’re running and here is what you are seeing.

Mansour 00:55:56  One of the very important metrics that we could look into is branch searches. Because at the end of the day, we are talking awareness. We want people to know our brand. One of the ways that show us they know about our brand is the brand searches. So this is where we look into and if you are doing different tests, different type of campaigns, here is a good place to look at what is happening in this channel and with looking at these numbers. Just keep that in mind. It’s not just looking at this to put the story together. You got to manually take different weeks, different months and stitch them together. Otherwise when you come here like okay, so so what? But when you put them together in different time periods, then you could build that story of, like this is happening, why that is happening.

Outro 00:56:50  I love that monster.

Josh Hadley 00:56:52  This has been super informative. Is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you think we need to drill into in 60s or less?

Mansour 00:57:02  Oh, there are so many things.

Mansour 00:57:03  Maybe it would be another session. There are so many like product opportunities, but there are so many things that Amazon has added. Recently. They mentioned this custom analytics I love it. There’s a report that you could just drag and drop and just I’ll show you before we leave one report that it’s amazing. I they added and usually people I think they don’t look at it and they don’t use it if it loads hopefully, which it doesn’t. Safari is the pain.

Outro 00:57:36  I don’t like Safari.

Mansour 00:57:38  Yeah. Okay, so there are different reports that you could. Of course, if you are using third party tools, you might have access to this. But one one thing that I love it is in their template. They added this recently just as KPI card performance. Add it here and boom you have like year to date, month to date, week to date. What is your performance compare you could say to last period or last year. So you see that drop or increase. It could be average per day absolute per day.

Mansour 00:58:10  So it is just one thing from customer analytics that if you save it there, you come here. You can in one view are okay. What’s going to happen in my business in the as a general view. This is a great one view. There are so many things here that you can build. Don’t underestimate it.

Josh Hadley 00:58:28  I love it that that could be a podcast session in and of itself is creating custom reports. But right. That is a brand new feature that Amazon has recently rolled out, and it actually can possibly replace some of the third party tools that you’ve previously had to use in order to visualize your data. Because like Amazon has like what, 10 or 20 plus different like reports separate from your detail page and conversions reports and all of that. Right. So like this can piece everything together for you. So I love this monster. As we wrap up, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing something.

Josh Hadley 00:59:12  Action item number one is you need to take a look at AMC. If you have never looked at AMC, Amazon Marketing Cloud. Today is the day because everybody has access to it. Go into your advertising console. And you said it was under the the reporting insights, right? Yes. Okay. So underneath the insights feature go and see Amazon Marketing Cloud. And the real value I remember this. This is ten plus years ago. The real value of Facebook ads back in the day was creating lookalike audiences. Was like hey, here’s the valuable audience that I found. These are the people opting in and purchasing my products whenever we uploaded those when we were doing wedding invitations. It was it felt like we were shooting fish in a barrel because I would say, hey, Facebook, find anybody that’s similar to these high value people. And we would always we we had a full list of people on our, our list and customers because of that. So likewise, something very worth exploring is Amazon Marketing Cloud.

Josh Hadley 01:00:18  So that’s action item number one. Begin building your custom audiences and lookalike audiences. Their action item number two is to begin experimenting with those audiences. So run a lookalike audience and then activate some brand tailored promotions, or activate some sponsored, brand sponsored display sponsored ad campaigns for those particular lookalike alike audiences and see how they perform. it’s going to be a trial and error. And I think that’s the the insight that you’re gleaning here. Manzoor is like, look, there’s not one like this, is it? You have to do this. Although I think everybody like one low hanging fruit everybody should do is the first audience you create is that ad add to cart the retargeting. You’re going to see really good ad performance on those. And it’s a customer you probably would not have seen before. And then my third and final action item is to begin experimenting with those brand tailored promotions alongside the customer journey, and begin creating some custom dashboards. I think the overall takeaway here for this is first, you’re creating the audiences.

Josh Hadley 01:01:34  Secondly, you’re then running some ad campaigns. But third, you have to be able to actually measure the success of these things. And it’s in that customer journey. It’s in actually creating a custom dashboard that can tell you like, hey, yes, you made this change last week and this is what it’s looking like compared to the previous week. So you will only know if things are successful if you a first test them, but B you actually have to measure their performance. So that’s my final synopsis for our listeners today. Mansour anything else you think I missed?

Mansour 01:02:10  No, you nailed it. On one use case, I would add for AMC that we see good results. People who viewed our detailed pages a few times, they haven’t purchased. There is a ready to use template. We see one of the best results from that as well. They have viewed our page twice, but they haven’t purchased it. That’s test data as well.

Josh Hadley 01:02:31  that’s a good hack. That’s a golden nugget there. Love it.

Josh Hadley 01:02:34  All right Mansour, love to ask every guest the following three questions. So here we go. Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Mansour 01:02:42  Well, actually, I wanted to go with, different book. But then I you reminded me of the myth. The myth is actually then I like actually, that was a very influential in my journey because that showed me how to think about the business to system and everything. I would say that was the most influential and most practical for me.

Josh Hadley 01:03:07  Yeah, it’s a fundamental like book to help you understand, like it, it should not be you working in the business.

Mansour 01:03:15  Yes.

Josh Hadley 01:03:16  So I love that great book recommendation. All right. What’s your favorite AI tool that you’ve been using it and how have you been using it AI tool.

Mansour 01:03:24  Recently I have been using two things. One is that now everyone is a coder. I, I’m using Visual Studio Code, which is for coding, but I integrated cloud AI in that. Oh man, it’s mind blowing.

Mansour 01:03:40  So from scratch some people use Is lovable, but for me, this one has been much better because you just write it plans. It is incredible in creating apps. So I use create website I use right now for our team. I want to create a bulk sheet editor somehow automate a few things. I’m going to use a cloud and Visual Studio Plus. Gemini recently for me has been very, very good because and the last actually practice that I did for Amazon Accelerate, I don’t know if you saw that or not. I gave all the YouTubes from Amazon, accelerate the keynotes. That’s what they are releasing, gave it to Gemini and said, okay, build me a one pager with all these updates, plus a link to the direct part of the YouTube video. Oh man, in five minutes I made it. I posted went like why are so many people used it? Because it was very good summary of everything that was announced. So these are what I’m using.

Josh Hadley 01:04:46  Brilliant, I love that. Well.

Josh Hadley 01:04:48  Well done. I love that idea. Very inspiring. All right. Third and final question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Mansour 01:04:58  I would say I love Kevin King because of the content. I love the newsletter like Kevin King as it is packed with all these, information that he gets from different people. That is one of the people I’m following to get kind of be updated with all the, hacks, I would say on the staff, especially his newsletter these days, I, I try not to miss any of his newsletters because there are great nuggets there.

Josh Hadley 01:05:31  Yeah, another solid recommendation. Monster. This has been awesome. If people want to learn more about Incrementum Digital, what’s the best way to learn more and reach out to you.

Mansour 01:05:42  So Incrementum Digital. The website, everything is there. You can connect with us. Or if you need a free audit for your account for Amazon advertising, we could do that. Plus, for me, I’m always online on LinkedIn.

Mansour 01:05:59  I’m very active posting. So you could reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Josh Hadley 01:06:03  Awesome. Well, I’m sure this has been an awesome conversation. Thanks for giving us some golden nuggets today. We’ll have to try to schedule a part two and dive real deep into some data analytics. If we don’t bore everybody to death first.

Mansour 01:06:18  So it’s a it’s was an honor. Loved our conversation.

Josh Hadley 01:06:23  Awesome. Thanks again for your time.

Outro 01:06:25  Thank you for listening. Visit Ecomm breakthrough com for more information. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, the best way you can show your appreciation is by clicking the subscribe button and quickly leaving a review. See you again next time!