Josh Hadley 6:15
I love it. That’s an amazing story. What I love about that story, though, is like your amount of like dedication hustling grind, right? Like it doesn’t this didn’t wasn’t handed over to you, right? You had to reach out to try to get DSP access. You know, you’re willing to work with somebody for free for the first few months, right? And just kind of prove yourself. I think there’s a lot of lessons, I think we could spend the whole time just focused on your journey, and the business principles that people could emulate as an entrepreneur starting up any business. But yeah, George, what I would love to dive into, and I think the main reason why people are gonna get a lot of value from today’s episode, is that for established brands that are already doing seven figures, in order to scale to eight figures and beyond, you’ve seen a lot of success with some DSP advertising strategies. Yeah. Why don’t you share maybe a couple of what those strategies are? And then we’ll go into each of them in that then some of the case studies that you have for them?
George Meressa 7:20
Yeah, sure. So I think the best place to start is just to kind of simplify it. Or if you if you’ve got yourself to seven figures, there’s already good use cases for your product right there. What Amazon called retail ready, people, like your products is going to be some good reviews because people wouldn’t be buying otherwise. So there’s already traction now. Let’s just say 10 people click on your product, you might get a 30% conversion rate or 40% conversion rate, which is great. But what happens with the 60%, those who don’t purchase those who don’t go the final step, it doesn’t mean they’re not interested. It just might be the wrong occasion. They might, they might have been on their mobile device, and they’re probably wanting to get home and check out later. So but our
Josh Hadley 8:06
kids and because they’ve got three kids that are going to barge through the door at any minute, just like here at my house.
George Meressa 8:13
Yeah, exactly. So there’s so many different reasons. Now, that is money on the table. You know, you’ve spent all that effort to get your rankings up organically, you’re spending what I’m sure a fortune on PPC to get the traffic there. So using remarketing, you could reengage with that audience for Amazon’s the most high platform. And you can do this with display ads to now the difference between display ads and DSP on the other hand is with with DSP, you can exclude anyone who’s purchased your product or any similar products at a certain timeframe. So it increases the efficiency, right? Now, you can take it another step. And you can also exclude anyone who’s looking at that product on the same day. Right? Because one of the big issues with Amazon DSP is, you know, we don’t get transparency from Amazon just yet on where those ads appear. So you can argue the facts, and I’m going to get into this later on. But you can argue the fact okay, if an ad served on the page where someone was going to purchase anyway, there’s Amazon DSP, recording that as a sale and taking responsibility for that, right, because that’s kind of realization. And that’s tough you have to be aware of so you can do that with DSP, you can put these extra layers in place to ensure you get a maximum efficiency of DSP. So to speak to anyone you’re using, if you’re using an agency to do DSP for you ensure that they’re done is showing not only excluding your product, you want to you know, if someone’s just bought a saucepan, right, they probably found the one they want, you’re not going to want to buy another one, right? So find every other source under the sun and exclude them as well create an audience for them and exclude them. And that works really well. So that’s obviously been one of the best kind of performing campaigns, you can create one of the best, and that’s a good, good place to start. One thing I’d also record meant anyone is if your agency is using similar product views or product searches as an audience don’t, right, this is Amazon’s way of trying to get more impressions and traffic. And you have no control, you don’t know what ASINs are in there. And I’m sure all of you already know, when you create auto campaigns when you create anything estimated by Amazon, right, the crazy variations they put in, that has nothing to do with your product, you have to just bear that in mind. So you need to take complete control when you’re building this. Now, that was our timing was perfect, because when we got into DSP, Amazon just about allows you to create your own audiences before it was already made audiences. So now we have the ability to do that. And with the rich data that we have from DSP rich first party data to kind of to act, right. It doesn’t get any better than that. I think a lot of people they focus too much on attribution. This isn’t working. This isn’t working well for us. But when you’re looking at the richness of the data, right, it is so underrated. It’s unbelievable. In the Amazon ecosystem is becoming more used outside of Amazon is still unheard of, and it’s barely kind of scratching the surface.
Josh Hadley 11:10
Yeah, yeah. No, I love that. George, I think you’ve provided a great summary. One of the first quick actions right and tactics that you could leverage with DSP is something that is very, very common in regular E commerce. If you own a Shopify site, one of the first ads that any digital marketer would recommend that you turn on is abandoned cart advertising and remarketing. Right, that’s one of the first ads with Amazon, we’ve got it all backwards, we all start with the you know, the keyword level searches. Now, again, that helps because people are pretty far down that funnel when they’re on Amazon and shopping there. So I think one action that a lot of our sellers can take is really start focusing and implementing some of these retargeting ad strategies if they’re not currently doing that. But I want to kind of pull things back a little bit more. George, I want to ask you the question, how does DSP and different strategies that you could use? But how does DSP advertising help a brand grow from seven to eight figures that you wouldn’t normally be able to achieve in sponsored ads?
George Meressa 12:22
Right? Okay. So with with Pay Per Click advertising, you hit thresholds, right, there’s only so much traffic you can get from a certain keyword that’s relevant, right, which is, which is great. So there’s only so much you can get now you can move outside of those relevant keywords to keywords that are slightly less relevant, but then you’re gonna have an impact with conversion rates, you know, is it relevant? does Amazon deem it as relevant I even gonna get the impressions for those keywords? Right, you can move it to all these other areas. So there’s going to be times, especially in niche areas, right? Where you’re gonna have hit the cap, you’ve hit the ceiling on what you can do. Now with display advertising, is constantly learning, right? So you got Amazon as an Amazon we’ve missed it’s kind of its Pro and its con in a way, because it’s corneas, we have no control of what ads serve, but the Pro is Amazon, you can optimize it for a row. So as time goes on Amazon’s demand side platform will learn what time of day, what positions, what ad creative what promotion converts best, and it will serve those ads more. Now with display ads, you can work up the funnel. So once you’ve got retargeting works really well, brilliant, you can’t really scale that, then you can move on to the consideration stage, right? Who is there out there that is likely to need my product but doesn’t even know it yet. Right? And that’s the amazing thing about you can target people before they even know they need your product. And now you’re talking about a massive see in terms of audience, right? And you’ve got little hints. So for example, if someone’s just bought a trolley and a baby pram, we call it in the US a pram or stroller, stroller, stroller, stroller, they’re likely to have a baby, right? If they’re likely to have a baby, then they’re probably going to need some diapers, right? So you can start advertising diapers before they even know they need it. Right. And these are some, these are some of the ways you can think about and this is demand side platform. What is there someone buys? Because we’ve got the information? Yeah, that makes them then eligible to potentially want your product. Yeah, right. And you can optimize that. And then over time, Amazon’s demand supply will learn Okay, with this audience, this is what works well, then you can go into market basket analysis, you could look at trends to find out okay, what are the what are the telltale points are there about my particular audience? Right? Are they those who earn between 50 to 100,000 a year are they are they those who earn between 102 100,000 a year, then you could add additional layers to this DSP, right, making it far more efficient. And still, you know, you’re talking about not only on Amazon of DSP, as well, you’re talking about off Amazon, too. So you’re talking about taking advantage of outside traffic into your listing by creating these audiences. And we know we all know how Amazon reacts outside traffic. So it’s gonna work in your favor. So with PPC, you could you could spend, you know, 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s, even a million a year, a month, sorry. But with DSP, you could spend 10s of 1000s 100,000 a day, if you had your question wrong button. Sure, waste a lot of money.
Josh Hadley 15:28
So yeah, if you could do it well, after limitless?
George Meressa 15:31
Yeah. And it’s Amazon have the space of Amazon shoes here. They understand and they know how much money they make with DSP, then it’s growing at a crazy rate. So what they’re thinking now is, how can we make people spend more money? If they increase, improve, attribution, improve reporting, improve targeted, then they’re gonna get more out of it? And I’ve seen this firsthand when you look at Google’s Display Network, but it’s so much more sophisticated. Yeah, well, Google’s double click, you’ve got trade desk. They’re very sophisticated platforms. Amazon’s demand side platform is nowhere near that. And I want people to grasp the power that Amazon has, that no one else has, which is the first party data, right? The fact that they are not even on top of it. All right, so there’s so much more stuff to come. And you get that as a seller, you get that in place, you get every part of the funnel, refined, right? And you will have a few years head start on everyone else, and you’ve got a funnel. So you know, right, if you don’t get a conversion on the first day, you know, you’re going to reach them later on with their remarket. So you got a macro level understanding of your business, and you can see how each piece fits together. Right. And one of the things I this is a shame we have on Amazon yet, but we have a Google is we have linear attribution. Right. We can see, okay, the journey of that customer might have started with that campaign. But then, but then for that that particular campaign had an impact before they made the transaction on the third campaign. Yeah, right. And when they introduced us on Google ads, right, it made everything so different for us, because we weren’t chopping out campaigns that looked like they weren’t working, because they had an impact, and they had a part to play in the funnel is gonna get there. They’re gonna provide the entire journey. And Amazon Marketing Cloud was already shot started showing symptoms of this.
Josh Hadley 17:26
That’s amazing. And I think as with everything, that first mover advantage on Amazon, is going to pay dividends across the board. We all wish we could have got into Amazon back in 2010 2015. Right. I think the same could be said now of DSP. I think that it’s true, exactly what you talked about. Amazon is going to take a is just going to follow Google’s playbook. Right? Yeah, they’ve hired a lot of Google X Google employees on the advertising side. And they’re saying, alright, what was working over here on your guys’s ad platform that, you know, made it so valuable? Obviously, for people to come advertise? What are what’s the data that people are looking for? Like you said, George, Amazon’s going to roll all of that out. So the earlier you get in there, and you start setting those up, you’re going to have years of, I guess, a head start compared to everybody else. So yeah, George, let’s now dive into some actual strategies. Let’s say somebody just just starting with DSP. Where would you recommend they start? Let’s assume they have. And I guess one thing that we should tell the audience’s that DSP is only the only way you get access to DSP is how George?
George Meressa 18:42
Yeah, so there’s two ways. You can go to Amazon directly. Amazon tend to approach kind of mid, mid mid level seven-figure sellers, or anyone can pick this up. And they propose, hey, why don’t we manage tsp for you. And that’s the first option, or you go to an accredited Amazon DSP agency, one of which we are, and you can do it or there’s a third way you can go down the self service option through a company like Kepler. But again, that’s you’re not getting the expertise there. But there are three options that you have at the moment in terms of how to do it. And probably now and it just goes to your point about you know, don’t you wish you started Amazon when it started? Have the barriers of entry are so high for this to not everyone is Yeah, is involved in this. So you can imagine the cost per 1000 impressions are way less than they’re going to be in the future. And I went to speak at an event in Manchester yesterday in the UK, I said your hand up if you’ve heard of DSP, no hands on, there’s still so many people that don’t even know it exists, let alone trying to use it.
Josh Hadley 19:45
Yeah, I love that. George. I think that is a golden nugget that I would definitely want our listeners to take away. We all complain about the increased CPC costs on sponsored ads on Amazon, right? The exact same thing is going to happen on DSP DSP is never going to be cheaper than it is today. And this is where you could really leverage some advanced strategies to take your brand from seven to eight figures and beyond. So let’s dive in George with some of those advanced strategies that you would recommend. What’s the first strategy, then, you know, because obviously, you’re going to build it on, it’s not like you got a DSP and you just lined it all up, because like you said, you can lose a bunch of money overnight. So let’s strategy number one and walk us through that methodology. Yeah,
George Meressa 20:31
so I think I think the biggest tip you got to take away anything from anything I said today, right? When you’re implementing DSP strategy, where you’re, whether you’re working with Amazon, or you’re working with an agency, or you’re trying to do it yourself is date be data driven, do not do anything on assumptions. We have the data available to us. So if you’re going to create in Mark and last are audiences don’t just do it because you think they match up with your product, right? You can use something called an overlap report DSP, you can create your you get your remarketing audiences and say to Amazon, okay, what audiences are there, similar to this where there’s a high level of overlap, and Amazon will show you that data, they will show you, here’s all of the available, we did this with one client, we managed to get a row as of eight. And this is across the board. This is for loyalty. This was for remarketing, this is from consideration, right. And average across to in that industry was was four and we will get in a while and we were scaling heavily. And this is just because we leveraged overlap reports. We’ve got the information and find out okay. And sometimes it’ll show the most obscure audiences which don’t make that makes absolutely no sense. But it doesn’t matter, right. Because as data driven as we’re getting information from someone, you can get the data from your remarketing audiences. Two: market basket analysis is a brilliant place as well. There’s so much useful information. So you can go into brand analytics, I mean, you can go into market basket analysis, you can get all the information about okay, if someone’s bought one of your items, I like more likely to buy these other three of the items. Right? You can you can reverse that and create an audience for anyone who’s purchased those particular items and you can serve them your ad. Again, these work tremendously well on DSP, right, you see some really good results. Now, another thing you could test out is, if you’ve done acing targeting with PVC, and you’ve seen really good results, right? There’s a strong chance that the acing target, the aces that you have are superior to your purchases, right, you’re probably really winning on price, got better review score, or just stand out completely, right? Leverage that take those aces that you’ve got working from PPC put that on DSP, because you’re not only now targeting them on the page where that product appears, you’re targeting them after they’ve looked at that product, and they’ve gone somewhere else. And on top of that, you can exclude them who exclude those who’ve purchased that product. So they’ve looked brilliant, that’s, you know, they’re interested, they haven’t purchased yet. And they’re looking around still. Yeah, now, these are not necessarily so be more data driven is the key strategy that I would recommend when when, when when doing DSP. I love
Josh Hadley 23:15
that. So the first step, I love that product targeting and the level, you know, the additional customizations that you’re able to make on DSP is something that you’re not going to get on sponsored display, right? Because you could pull up you know, sponsored display ads for product targeting, right? But you cannot remove but don’t send this ad if they’ve already bought this competitor’s product, right. So I see that as a huge advantage. George, let’s walk through. So what would be step number one, if you’re signing up for DSP today, would the first strategy be setting up retargeting? Is that the first strategy you would recommend?
George Meressa 23:54
Okay, so, if we take a step before that, right, find the right partner, please do not treat this, like you’re getting taken on the PPC account manager because the big difference here is, when you’re taken on a PC, PPC Account Manager, you can, you can terminate their access at any given point, if you’re not happy for whatever reason, right? And you can transfer that information somewhere else. When when you subscribe to DSP, with any provider, right? Your Account lives in there. See, if you decide at any given point, to terminate your subscription with that see, you’re gonna have to start again in someone else’s See, which means there will be no data transferred over from one to another. Right you’re gonna be stuck with that now if you’ve been running DSP for 6, 7, 8 months, nine months, 10 months and and you’ve seen some decent results Yeah, throw yet Remember, it’s eight 910 months of Amazon learning what works well in your account, optimizing and getting good performance, right. So trying to transfer over it’s gonna have to learn all of that from scratch. On top of that, you’ve been serving your ads for a while and after Seeing the bias in many platforms, this isn’t just Amazon, if you seven ads for a while, you’re gonna have benefits in terms of pricing. So if you shut that off and you try and go somewhere else, you’re just going to look like a brand new seller who’s never spent anything on Amazon before. You’re not going to get those Preferred rates. So first things first, really quiz, DSP agent you’re going to work with, find out, ask friends who you worked with. And the one thing that frustrates me more than anything else is when someone goes with a DSP provider, because they’re the cheapest, right? It’s the stupidest thing you could do. Because if you have a Ferrari or Rolls Royce, would you try to find the cheapest garage to take it to you wouldn’t, you’d want to find the best garage. So you’re looked after and with your business, you want to make sure you go with an agency as credible and can look after. So we always we never rush anyone on DSP. We’ll just do your due diligence and make sure that’s the first step. The second step is George
Josh Hadley 25:54
So yeah, let’s pause there. Because I think that would actually be very, very helpful for our listeners, what are some of the what’s a checklist that you should kind of go through and walk through that an agency that you’re looking to have do DSP for you?
George Meressa 26:06
The first thing is don’t go to Amazon, right? But I’m sure they won’t mind me saying this. Right. But But actually, they will. But I’m gonna 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. 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 acellular Hold on one sec. Impressions isn’t really the key thing for us. What are we 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 slight uncertainty with attribution at the moment it could look to, to their favor, right? That’s the first thing that second, when you do go to an agency, the first step you should take is go on to Amazon’s accredited partners page, right and check out DSP providers. So Amazon DSP providers, just put something on Google go into 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 of Amazon, they will tend to have a partner badge somewhere which links straight to that page shows you Hey, their official partner. Now, if they’re not an official partner, they might be piggybacking off someone else’s see, right? You don’t want to get into that. Because if they’re piggybacking off someone else’s seed, right, and let’s just say, there’s some internal issues and they get kicked out of their seat, they no longer have access to your account to the content. You do reach, you don’t know. Right? So you want to make sure you’ve got someone who’s got OCF the 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 to a 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 is today, the steps that I would recommend taking when when trying to find a DSB? Agent? I would even go as far as asking questions about business. What’s the purpose of the business? Are you looking to do? How big is it? How long has it been going? Is it is it a brand new business as we started up for a bit and might not be there tomorrow? Yeah. Is it one has been there for a while, is, you know, you want to you just want to really find out how many JSP pages do you have? How many of them are certified? How many have taken the exams, I would just do the due diligence, ask those questions before it’s too late. And then before you’re stuck with someone,
Josh Hadley 28:35
yeah, I think that is the 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 the strategies. Let’s say you have found the right agency to work with, what’s the first strategy you should be implementing with DSP?
George Meressa 29:03
Yes, the first strategy is 100% of the market. You want to you want it you want to Okay, no, no, actually, no, you want to find the best agents to target. Right? So you want to target agents that have, 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’re showing high interest, right? If they don’t purchase going down this process, there’s nothing wrong. There’s a conversion issue here. So there might be some issues with your listing. There might be some issues with 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, was getting a good volume of sales? Was that a good amount of traffic? You want to have at least 5000 impressions, no less on it and a given asin because that shows a month days by Yeah, that’s shown 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 facets sets up some kind of foundation work in terms like a, here’s some easy money we can pick up. Okay, as this as a as a start. So you’ve got every mark.
Josh Hadley 30:18
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 yes, better. That’s when that that’s like your first criteria. 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 Meressa 31:05
Yeah. And you think 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 and what was it? What is it? What’s 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 so much to do before we even go into DSP. Right. So once you’ve done that, then once you’ve found a winning acent, once you found that this you will in essence, what you want to do is you want every market, 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 Hadley 31:46
So you want to add on. So you’re turning on two different types of retargeting. You’re turning on retargeting for your own ASINs and then you’re retargeting your competitors ASINs that have not yet bought Correct? None. And
George Meressa 31:59
so you’re creating two audiences. So audience of those who have viewed your product, but you’ve also got a new audience of those who have, who have purchased your product and just any one of your competitors products. And 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. Okay, that
Josh Hadley 32:23
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 Meressa 32:32
I think it’s the cross sell the cross sell. So Brad, go into brand matchroom back brand, metric and brand analytics, sorry, then goes into market basket analysis, take all the ASINs dead as they are already given to us farmers, they perform incredibly well. 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 go straight after remarketing. And they tend to do well, they tend to have a higher audience especially need to brand sales as well so and so go down that route. build that. Now, once you’ve built this out, go back to your remarketing audience, put that Overlap report and find other audiences that you can build that have an affinity score of over five now, overlap reports as only available on overload report is 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 just as well, I only found this out at the PROSPER show in Vegas this year, but apparently there’s rumors about the roadmap of display ads basically being able to do you can do in DSP. So Amazon’s trying to trying to get to that place. Now the question is, you can wait for that. But it could be a year, 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 built build out the cross cross sell campaigns, where you’re targeting a sense from a market basket analysis, that you can target everyone who’s purchased those particular ASINs. Right, as one audience and you can also target those who have viewed those particular cases, slightly less conversions, but a high reach. Yeah, that’s, that’s what you do. And then what you want to then do is you want to then create bespoke acent targeted campaigns. So you want to look at the essence that you’re targeting if the competitors on PPC that you’re doing right now, okay, and you want to re 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 stools and we would go as far as Okay, find every yellow stool that’s been sold on Amazon and re advertise your our yellows to find every red store that’s been advertised on Amazon and target our reds to fight wait 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 to asin, your target everyone who, so you want to create a few audiences. 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 60 days. So they’ve purchased in the past, but it hasn’t purchased right, recently. And now you can also exclude anyone who is in your, in your subscribers save model. So you’re excluding anyone who hasn’t subscribed, they have purchased your product, and they might be likely to purchase again, it’s just been some time, they tend to convert very well. Now you can add additional input that 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 it’s very it’s very again, it’s being very heavily 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 sell a 30 day supplement range, you want to target those who purchased 20 days ago, because they’re probably going to want to jump 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 ASINs the same supplement 60 days ago or five days ago, and they’re probably going to need to top up again. So they’re likely that you know that they into the product they need in and then they want to buy Vitamin D, Vitamin C, Vitamin D tumeric, supplements, right? And you can advertise your product. So it doesn’t get more tailored and relevant than that. So supplement brands do true. If you’re a supplement brand and you did over 2 million a year you need to get on DSP is is a no brainer.
Josh Hadley 36:59
That is 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. George, I know we’re kind of running out of time here, because we’ve got so much that we could dive into here. So I want to make sure that we provide the best value here. What I would love to do is do you have any case studies that you could share with some simple tactics that or strategies that some of the brands that have worked with you have implemented and what results have they seemed to help grow their brand?
George Meressa 37:41
Yeah, so we had one brand that was doing about four to five million a month when they came on board with us 500 different products. And we literally just leveraged remarketing, with those products, literally creating customer marketing campaigns for every single one of ASINs. And with that, we were able to get $4.6 million in revenue over a year and a half of Arizer 15. Pacific rough has been for that for that particular ASIN. And that was just solely remarketing. So that’s one case study. And these case studies are all on our website. So it’s not it’s been completely transparent. Some of them, you know, they’ve even been happy to share the brand as well. So there’s one where we were able to increase traffic and generate 64,000 in sales within one month. And this was again, leveraging overlap reports, making sure that we found audiences that are relevant to to what we can see for the remarketing audiences we’ve got. And that again, did really well for our SAS. Another case study. We’ve got we’ve got one particular brand right now they’re incredibly aggressive. And they’ve gone from not spending much to think the spend around $200,000 a month on DSP. And we’re constantly we’re now really pushing consideration stage, we’re really getting into some some detail with layering, and finding out as much information about the consumer and adding additional layers to kind of refine the audience we’re appearing to, and we’re just not running out of traffic, traffic. So we’re just constantly increasing budgets. And
Josh Hadley 39:15
I love that those are some great strategies and sounds like for every single brand, it’s a little bit different, right? The approach is going to be a little bit different. And I think that’s the importance of finding the right agency that you could work with to leverage some of these things. George, is there anything that you think we should share with the audience to kind of tie all of this up as it relates to DSP and the strategies that you could implement to grow your brand?
George Meressa 39:43
I would say, if you’re if you’re thinking about doing Amazon DSP, if you’re considering it, or it’s the first time you heard about it, talk to the community. Try and understand it. Please do not be put off about attribution. Attribution is an issue but I’m telling now from my experience, are working with a whole load of brands right now. And they’re absolutely killing it on DSP. And we’re watching their business reports and overall sales. And we’ve seen parallel increases when we’re scaling adspend. And we’re seeing sales. So please don’t be put off by that. Give it a try. If you haven’t done so already, and yeah, speak to some experts about it. Awesome.
Josh Hadley 40:24
I love that. 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, 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 two 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, vet 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 agency, you’re gonna 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. 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 10 $12 range? Is DSP really the right fit for them? It depends.
George Meressa 42:17
If it’s a high impulse product, and there’s there’s a good volume going through it that we have seen it work at times.
Josh Hadley 42:24
Okay. 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 set up, 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 light everything up at once. This is start with retargeting, see what’s working, see what ads see which ASINs 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 can implement to keep moving up the funnel, targeting your competitors’ ASINs 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 the SP. So those are my three takeaways. George, is there anything else that you would add? To summarize this all up
George Meressa 43:52
there? You’ve done so well, mate. Perfect summary? Yeah.
Josh Hadley 43:56
All right. Well, you’re the DSP expert. So your stamp of approval means a lot. All right, George. So let’s dive into the final three questions that I like to ask every guest. Question number one is what is the most influential book that you’ve read and why?
George Meressa 44:11
I think the most influential book I read is The Culture Code. So it’s about bringing together how to get a group to work really well together by a chap called Daniel Coyle. That has helped me build a team, especially when I didn’t know what I was doing. So help me build a team being open to get in other people’s opinions, and trying to create a culture where the safe and people can share their ideas and trying to build from the bottom up. So any advice or suggestions given by those in the front line managing the accounts, being open to take on whatever they say, rather than trying to take a top down approach when you’re telling them what to do? That has been game changing?
Josh Hadley 44:55
That’s amazing. I have not heard of that book. And that sounds like An amazing book to help somebody that’s trying to build a team. And obviously, culture is such an important aspect. When you’re trying to build a team, you want to create that sticky situation where they enjoy working with you. Let’s go to question number two here. What is a new maybe software or productivity tool that you’ve recently discovered? that you think is going to be a game changer?
George Meressa 45:21
Yeah, I think the biggest issue is not a tool. But one of the biggest things in our company that that we’ve implemented internally for productivity that’s worked really well, is introducing one to one meetings of every single person in the team. And so from my business coach, it’s called line noon. So you look at what’s been done last week, you look at any issues in the business, any opportunities in the business, and you look at next week, and you go through that with the team every week, and you get their opinions. Okay, what, what issues do you see in their business? What issues do you see in accounts, and then getting them to be practicing what you’re going to do to sort out getting them to write that down under next week? And then reviewing every week? What was it that you saw that in terms of issues? What was it useful in terms of which opportunities and what have you done about it? So that seemed productivity from everyone. So there’s consistently new structures and systems been put in place in the business that I don’t even know about? Right? Because you’ve got other people doing the live meetings with those with other people, so And before he even gets to me, that issue has already been resolved that that opportunity to really been taken advantage of. Yeah. So taking that approach has helped have more eyes on the business from every angle, and it’s trained those who have just started, or have been there for a little while, but I don’t tend to speak to as much to take kind of a business owners kind of point of framework and, and see it from our lens and kind of look out, you know, if there’s anything that’s that’s coming out, or they’ve read, knock, whether it’s interesting, or new developments is shared, as I think he’s done about it,
Josh Hadley 46:54
I love that. And I’ll just echo exactly what you just talked about there, George, and I’ll add kind of the twist and what we do in our business, we have regular one on one meetings with each of our team members, every single team member has a one on one meeting, whether it’s with me, or whether it’s with their direct supervisor or manager. And it is so so important. It allows you to coordinate what happened last week. And what are you committing to accomplishing this week? And in addition to that, it’s addressing what issues do you see what problems are you having? One thing that we have asked each of our team members to do? That has been very powerful. So we call it our 1311 method, state the one problem, then come to that meeting, not just saying, Hey, I found a problem, present us with three solutions to that problem, then, from those three solutions, provide us one recommendation as to how you think we could or which of those three solutions do you feel like what would be the best solution for us to follow and why? And then lastly, tell us, how do we prevent from running into this issue again in the future. So that has been super powerful. And again, it enables team members to feel like they can make decisions. And as a manager, it allows you to see their decision-making skills when they recommend which solution they would choose. So I love that. George, last question here, who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that you would recommend other sellers should be following and why?
George Meressa 48:27
And this is gonna be a very obvious one. And most people in the e-commerce space are probably following this guy. But it’s Gary Vee, I think, from the get-go. I was following his content. And it’s always inspired me to just keep working and have a good work ethic and, and also have an abundance mentality and being happy and willing to just share and the good will always come from when you share and that you’re never too late. You’re never too old. So like, just time, there’s no need to rush. Slow growth is okay. So there’s a few things that kind of, kind of, were instilled in me by him.
Josh Hadley 49:07
Yeah, yep, he is great, he shares a lot of great business insight. So completely agree. Now, George, this has been a fantastic episode, you have dropped a lot of knowledge. I think people are gonna 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, George has got some wicked smart strategies. 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? Yeah,
George Meressa 49:39
So I’m the Founder of Clear Ads. So if you were to search Clear Ads on Google, or if you go to Clear C L E AR Ads dot co at UK, we’ve got another website fill in the form they tend to all go past me. It will tend to be George Roberts who will pick up those those those inquiries, but If there’s anything that kind of any wants to speak to me about something, I’m more than happy to just jump on a call and talk about it to say, that’s the best way. George Meressa is my name, you can find me on Facebook as well and add me as a friend.
Josh Hadley 50:12
Awesome. I love that. And George, I believe you have a special offer. For our listeners, you had mentioned that first limited time you’re going to waive your $500 setup fee and reduce your management fee for 10 by 10%. For the first three months, what do people need to do in order to kind of claim that offer?
George Meressa 50:31
Yeah, just come and get an audit from us. So we can go into your account and we can tell you Okay, one, are you ready for DSP is going to be a good place for you to start with and, and, and and to do you have PPC in place. So DSP is 50% of our business, PPC is the center of this. So we know PPC very well, too. I just don’t talk about as much because I still think not enough people know about DSP. So we can look at the structure of PPC and figure out what needs to be done there in order to move on to the DSP. If that’s not been the case just yet. And then as you do that, then automatically you opt in for the offer, as long as you just say, Hey, I heard about this from Josh’s podcast, somewhere in the message will automatically put you into that
Josh Hadley 51:16
awesome buffer. Well, George, that’s that’s a generous offer. So thanks for sharing that with our honored guests. And thank you for the wisdom that you shared today, George, and thanks for joining us.
George Meressa 51:27
No worries. Thank you for having me, Josh.
Outro 51:30
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