Destaney Wishon 4:18
Yeah, so I definitely got lucky with that first job. When you have that type of money to play with when you’re really early on in the Amazon game, it forces you to learn a lot. And as we all know, Amazon changes to a quick I mean an ad console alone, there’s probably an update every week, maybe every you know, couple of weeks. So I had to get really good at going really deep. And that’s where I found my passion. It’s the combination of strategy but also communication and marketing and advertising and math. So I just loved it and honestly like I said it everything changes so quick that if I tried to do anything else at this point, it would really dilute my ability Do Amazon ads? Well, and
Josh Hadley 5:02
that’s kind of what? Well, I think it’s a smart decision to be doubled down on Amazon advertising right now, because we know how profitable it is for Amazon. And Amazon only continues to invest more resources, more updates to advertising, because they see that as a clear path to again future profitability for their own business. 100 Yeah, Destaney, with that, let’s kind of kick things off by talking about, you know, what is the importance of PPC, especially for established sellers, many of our listeners are established sellers. They’re making, you know, high six figures, or they’ve probably crossed that seven figure mark, for sure. But they want to grow their business to eight figures and beyond. What role does Amazon advertising play in helping them scale up their business?
Destaney Wishon 5:51
So I’m gonna go a little bit philosophical in the beginning. For one, this is our ideal client range, I think we’re on track to manage around 75 million and spin this year, the average TACoS for all of those is around 10 to 12%. So we’re just under a billion dollars in sales in the biggest variable, I think we see is that mindset shift to being solely profitability, focusing solely cashflow focused. I mean, I always tell everyone, like when I’m talking to, you know, the business owners and the leadership team managing these brands, like I your cash flow intensive business, you will live and die by your p&l. But there comes a time, especially on a retail media platform like Amazon, where you have to pay to play at some point in time. I mean, all of search is now oversaturated with ads. And it’s not a traditional marketing expense. Like when you pay for a billboard, you’re paying for views or when you put an ad on Facebook or Instagram, you’re paying for those views, and just that, you know, incremental KPI on Amazon advertising, you spend more money on the right ads, your organic rank increases. That’s the part that I think becomes really, really valuable. As you’re kind of switching to that mindset of becoming an eight figure seller, almost all of your eight figure nine figure sellers on the platform know that it’s more than advertising. You’re not advertising just for clicks, you’re advertising to improve your organic rank. And that focus is I think, what makes the brands that I’m seeing successful, really take it to the next level. Yeah,
Josh Hadley 7:20
I completely agree. It’s kind of having that mindset shift, right? That, Hey, I just need to become profitable on all of these ad campaigns, what’s the most profitable campaign and turn off the rest? Right. But there’s a lot that goes into actually, you know, using an ad campaign and PPC, to help boost your organic rankings, there’s an actual strategy behind that, because you can’t just, Hey, I got a million dollars a day Destaney, I should be ranked number one on every single keyword, right? That’s not going to happen. So definitely, why don’t you walk us through? What is that strategy of how does PPC play a role in boosting somebody’s organic ranking?
Destaney Wishon 8:04
Yeah, so let’s kind of talk about organic rank in general, in order to rank well, you need to be driving high amounts of volume, because Amazon is an algorithm, and they need to have a lot of data to say, hey, these customers do love buying this product, when they search for this, you know, five orders for the term chapstick is not going to get you ranked for chapstick, because the top four competitors are doing hundreds of 1000s. So you really need to have volume comparable to them. The second thing that influences organic rank is conversion rate. So if you’re converting less than all of your competitors, you’re not going to rank well, because you’re sending a signal to Amazon that when customers click on your listing, they’re not buying. So that’s not beneficial for Amazon, regardless of you know, theories around Amazon ads, and Amazon taking our money. Amazon at the end of the day, once customers click on Products and buy products, that’s what’s going to make them be successful. So if you’re not converting well, you’re not going to rank well. So we work backwards from those two KPIs. When we’re looking at Amazon advertising and organic rank, we want to make sure we can drive high amounts of volume to keywords that convert the best. Now the next question I always get is okay, well give me some category metrics. How do I know what a good conversion rate is? How do I know how much volume to drive? Well, up until the last six months, we didn’t have that data first party, we could pull it through tool providers who are you know, running forecasts and scraping data, but it wasn’t from Amazon. Well, recently, Amazon’s rolled out something called brand metrics. So everyone who wants you know actual steps go into your advertising console. In the top left hand corner, you’re going to see this little button that looks like an upwards arrow, click on that. You’re going to see a tab called brand metrics and it’s going to show you all the categories related to your brand. You’re going to have supplements. If you sell supplements, it’s going to be supplements, protein, probiotics, and all the subcategories underneath it. Click on the one you want to analyze. When you analyze that category. It’s going to open up your brand metrics data, which is the most powerful data I have seen an advert Tasmin console. The reason being is its advertising and organic. It’s not just your ad data and what it shows us your actual conversion rate for that category, compared to category average, and category top. So you’ll see something along the lines of okay for protein, my brands converting at a 25% conversion rate, category average is 30%. What can I, you know, take from that, okay, well, I’m converting less than 5% 5%, less than category average. So I need to improve my listing and improve my offer before I can drive more traffic, right? Because again, you’re not going to rank better if you’re not converting better. The second thing that’s very valuable is it actually shows you detail page views as well. You can say, hey, for my brands, and protein, I’m getting 3000 detail page views a month, my competition is getting 30,000 detail page views, which is a good indicator of how much volume again, we’re gonna need to drive within that category to improve organic rank. So once I have that, you know, compiled data, that’s when I’m going to start making advertising strategies. But I’m gonna pause to see if you have any questions, or anything your audience may want to know.
Josh Hadley 11:06
I love that I’m following you. I think one question would be Amazon’s rolled out a lot of they’ve shared a lot more data than they have historically with us. So how is brand metrics different than you have product opportunity Explorer? You have the search query performance reports, right? And I’ve heard that the biggest challenge and we’ve been trying to navigate this ourself is like, which data is correct, because they’re not lining up the conversion rate over here for search query performance isn’t matching up with opportunity explorer probably isn’t matching up with brand metrics. Yep. So what is the actual data that we should be paying attention to?
Destaney Wishon 11:46
Well, you know, I will say like, what makes me a good advertiser is actually that I’m a decent entrepreneur, in that I tried to do things at scale. Search query performance report is one of my favorite reports for a brand owner who has nothing but unlimited time to focus on search query performance report, but it’s not very scalable, because it’s on the asin level. And then on the search term level. Another thing I’ll say is search query performance report isn’t pulling in full engagements across the board. It’s only pulling search terms. It’s not pulling all the traffic, you’re gathering from PDP views. So if someone goes to your competitors, PDP and then pulls up your listing, that detail page view is not being pulled in, right? So it is there’s gonna be discrepancies. Why brand metrics is so powerful, in my opinion, is, again, it’s advertising an organic, organic data combined, that is, the top title of brand metrics says that so it’s actually clearly laid out, that’s not us pulling assumptions, or Amazon, you know, bullcrapping, something to us. And to it starting, like top down, it’s giving me broad data. So now I can easily scroll through my categories, rather than finding all these incremental search terms and trying to work backwards to identify an issue brand metrics, you know, allows me to see it within five minutes. And then if I want to go deeper, that’s when I’m going to start pulling out product opportunity, explore brand analytics, and then looking at query,
Josh Hadley 13:04
and I’ll let you kind of continue down that path that you are going. But my kind of next question, maybe you’ll lead into this is alright, let’s assume that I see I have a higher than average conversion rate for you know that those brand metrics, right than the competition for that category. But some, as we know, like every keyword is going to have different performance, right? So I would assume you have a strategy that says, Okay, if we’re higher across the board, that doesn’t just mean, hey, turn everything up on our Amazon ads, every single keyword gets 10x the spin now because we’re on fire, instead, I would assume that, do you take things at a keyword level and say, Okay, we’re higher here, but we’re lower here. Can you explain that in more detail?
Destaney Wishon 13:54
That is the absolute perfect segue into the Amazon advertising strategy behind organic rank. So everyone wishes they had unlimited budgets, and every seller I talked to thinks they have an unlimited budget until they don’t. So what we really look at is working backwards from that budget, and then selecting the top keywords. So we can either use search query performance report to understand our conversion rate, or what I like to do is just go into my campaign manager, look at all my exact terms and figure out what’s converting the best. Once I figure out what’s converting the best, I then figure out my traffic potential, right? I say, hey, you know, I’m converting really, really well for you know, vegan protein powder, but I’m not converting well, for protein powder, protein powders very competitive. So then it’s where should I put my budget that’s going to drive the most organic rate growth that I can afford, it’s going to be in vegan protein powder, because it has just enough of a competitive advantage. And then what we do is we create single keyword campaigns. So that way, I know exactly how much budget I want to give and we focus on top of search. Now, if you’re on a limited budget, you may not be able to afford this, right, some of these keywords get really expensive. But we focus on top of search, because that’s where the most volume comes in every single customer who goes to Amazon sees the ads at the top of the page. So we’ll set up this exact match campaign focusing on vegan protein powder, we’ll put really high bids that we’re winning top of search, sometimes I’ll put a top of search modifier, and especially if I’m using a software that I need to override, and I’m going to put a controlled amount of budget to this keyword however much I can afford. For vegan protein powder, speaking from experience, it’s going to be like a 10 to $12. So most people aren’t going to be profitable. And that’s okay, the goal is not profitability, right? The goal is organic rank increase. So Josh, you’ve been in the space for a while, do you remember the days of like search find by doing giveaways or everything, of
Josh Hadley 15:48
course, giving your product away for free reviews, and, you know, that was an easy way to boost your, you know, I guess number of sales, right, your velocity, exactly. And
Destaney Wishon 15:59
the whole concept of that was driving to one to two keywords that we wanted to rank for, and then making it look like we had an inflated conversion rate, because we’re giving away products, and we know people are gonna buy, they’re gonna pick these two keywords. And the reason it worked is because it was driving high volume, two keywords that converted well, so all we’re doing is taking that exact same strategy, but applying it to ADS, except for now, you have to assume that you’re giving away product again, you’re not going to have this profitable advertising strategy, which is why we put them in their own campaign, because sometimes you can’t afford to drive as much traffic as needed. And you’re gonna have to drive slower traffic over time and build up. But as long as you’re tracking that organic rank increase, you’re in an OK, spot.
Josh Hadley 16:42
I love that. That’s a that’s a huge mindset shift. I just had the lights just turned on with that. When you just when you said, you know, hey, we all kind of did these old search, find buy campaigns, way back in the day 2016 Were giving away products at 90% off on the big deal sites or whatever, they’d have to search something. Right. I was so confident and being like, yeah, okay, yet spend that money that that will return in organic ranking, I have no problem. But then when it comes to Amazon advertising, it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, my a cost is 90%. On this, turn it off like that? I can’t that that’s yeah, that’s not realistic. That’s not profitable. But with that being said, it’s like, yeah, have that same mindset of, no, I’m losing money on this. I understand that I’m giving this away. But the return is that this is going to boost my organic ranking. Now. In theory, that’s it sounds perfect. And I like that that mindset shift, I’m going to dive into the Yeah, it sounds beautiful and simple, right? Like everybody should be crushing ads. Now. The challenge is, number one, you’ve got to have the conversion rate that’s above others, right? That’s a whole other conversation on listing optimization, and different things you can do on your detail page to increase your conversion rates. We’ll save that for another guest. But for you Destaney, it’s how do you track that organic ranking, and actually tying the two together? That says, Yes, because I started spending, and I boosted my top of search placement for this keyword. I saw this, you know, increase in organic ranking. And do you see that being repeated? So I mean, there’s multiple questions in there. How are you tracking those keywords? How are you tying it together? I’m writing, because there’s so many different variables in Amazon, right?
Destaney Wishon 18:38
So I want to start off by saying one thing, because this always comes up and the lightbulb moment you just had others need to have a cost is not a good indicator of a keyword that’s going to improve organic rank. The reason being is it’s all dependent on how much you spend on that keyword. So I think the most extreme case I’ve seen is we manage one of the top sellers of massage guns. And it’s one of those categories where people just blow money. And winning top a search for the term massage gun is going to cost us around $25 a click. So at $25 A click if we have a $50 products, that means every two clicks needs to drive in order in order to just break even, right. So most people who have been in the space for a while will look at that term and say that a cost is terrible. Because we’re bidding so high, turn it off, I will look at that keyword and say our a cost is bad because I have to bid high, but it’s converting so well. It’s improving organic rank. So I’m okay with taking a loss on this keyword for a certain period of time until I’m ranked in the top four. So that’s kind of one thing I’ll say as an advertiser of how to do so much education on a cost is not a good indicator of success now that CPCs are so much higher because you have to pay for the best real estate on the page. And if you’re not willing to pay you’re not going to get through Take any day anymore. So I’ll start by saying that now working backwards again, our largest brand has 20,000 skews. In terms of SKU size, our largest brand in terms of sales does like $300 million a year. So I can’t track every single keyword for every single products. Like that’s not something that we can conceptualize. And I don’t think anyone should try to do it unless you’re a brand owner. So we had to come up with like telling metrics that let us know when we should focus on something versus pulling back. And the best metric we found so far is tacos. We’re being honest. So what we’ve started building out is we’ll use like our number one hero product for whatever brand as a good gauge of like, this is what we’re trying to get to right 10% Tacos on our number one products. When we run these rank campaigns for certain products, we’re then going to make sure our tacos is you know, improving, usually in the first four weeks of a rank campaign our ad spend is increasing, but our organic rank increased yet right too soon. So that’s normal. But after four to six weeks, we should start seeing that tacos decrease or stabilize. Because our organic rank is now increasing. So much more like the two things we want to look for is either taco stays the same, but revenue increases. That means organic ranks increasing, or tacos is decreasing, which means ad spend increased, but organic rank increased even more. So that’s like the number one variable you’ve used. Now I have videos on how to use search query performance report on tracking organic ranking increases per search term. But that is not scalable. So do not come to like your agency or your team and expect that because it’s almost too much data, like Amazon opened up Amazon Marketing, cloud, Amazon Marketing, stream brand metrics, search group performance report and everyone like in theory, everything’s great. You can actually track your organic rank increase on the search term level using branch share within search query. But can you do it at scale? Yeah, not Well,
Josh Hadley 21:57
yeah. I think that’s, that’s fascinating, your approach of the measuring tacos overall, but also having the mindset and understanding that, you know, it’s going to take four to six weeks. So is that kind of what you’ve seen? Because I think that’s, that’s where a lot of brand owners get scared, right is, yeah, a cost is really high. And again, I don’t know why a cost was always drilled into our mind from the get go. But that was like Amazon’s measurement. And now it’s all about topics which it should have been from the beginning. Yeah, but that’s the nervous thing for for a brand owner, right? Because the physical products, ecommerce business is very cashflow intensive. And so unless you have just unlimited amounts of you know, backing behind you, you have to be wise and prudent with the number of keywords that you’re going to say, I’m going to take a loss at this. And for your first four to six weeks, you still don’t have conclusive data as to whether like, Yep, my organic ranking is going up this $1,000 A day that I’m losing, it’s well worth it. Because you could go out of business tomorrow. Yep, implementing that strategy across every single one of your skews if you wanted to. So what advice and recommendations do you have that way, Destaney, for a brand owner that wants to implement this strategy strategy, but also have some level of confidence that what they’re going to do is going to pay dividends down the road?
Destaney Wishon 23:25
Yeah, so I want to give a shout out to the first thing, which is using your brand metrics to actually verify where you should be spending, I have so many brands come to me and say, Hey, we have the best product in the category. And then I look at their data. And I’m like, you don’t have the best product and category. So start there. But this is like the best philosophy when you’re considering organic rank. And I love this. So I’m sorry, my arrows. But for those who are listening in basically the concept is if I have $1,000, I can either spend $100 on 10 keywords, and hope I’m incrementally ranking and matching the volume of my competitors for those 10 keywords. Or I could take $1,000 and invest in one keyword. And again, hope I’m matching the volume of all my competitors. I would rather focus on one keyword because that’s what’s going to make it a quicker increase in organic rank. Now to give an example, I think the most crazy case study we ran is we have a brand who spends around $2 million a month and we wanted to go all in on one keyword for Prime Day. They had a discount. We wanted to invest in this keyword from a market share perspective, our advertising conversion rate was 35% which was insane. It’s a really high number. We spent $70,000 during the lead up of prime week and prime week and our organic rank increased from number eight to number four. Now a lot of people are like well that’s not a ton you’re already on page one. What’s the difference is a huge difference because when you’re number four, you’re now directly below the sponsored ads but you’re above the video and search ad And you’re above that sponsored carousel. So you’re really moving up, you know, 15 different placements. And because of that our tacos stayed the same. And for those who like don’t understand math, what it means is our spend increased by $70,000 on this one keyword, but our organic lifts increased the same amount. So that percentage stayed the same. So if we would have spent $10, to drive $20, in sales, you know, we’re now spending $1,000, to drive $20,000 in sales. And that’s what this did. And once you’re in the top four, you can then pull back on your spend, right, because that organic placements going to maintain the volume that you’re having to supplement with ads. So we were able to pull back on spins. And once we did that our tacos went even lower, and we were able to ride the wave of being in the top four, it took less than 14 days, that is a huge increase in less than 14 days. But the reason was, we had enough frickin money to maximize volume and to match our top competitors on the page
Josh Hadley 25:58
makes a lot of sense, which I think leads into the next question here. And you briefly touched on this, a lot of brand owners come to you probably and say, Oh, well, my budget is unlimited. If it’s profitable, right. Like if it’s profitable, then spend as much as you want. And I think I’ve fallen into that camp at some times. So Destaney based on your wealth of knowledge and experience working with even higher level brands doing 300 million a year, what, like, how would you recommend a brand owner comes up with a budget for their products? Yep.
Destaney Wishon 26:34
Yeah. So a budgets obviously, so dependent on goals and growth and all of those things. So I always struggled to give that I will say I interviewed a ton of the other agency owners, I think we’re managing in total, I counted like over $500 million worth of spend. And what everyone said an average tacos for a high growth brand that’s trying to be competitive is around 10 to 15%. I don’t love giving that as a general gauge, because I know a lot of people have certain SKUs that are going to be a lot higher, because no more competitive category and different goals. And I hate giving like one size fits all solutions. Anyone who’s listened to me or follow me knows that it’s like my biggest pet peeve. But I will say something to remember is that Amazon advertising is actually really precise. You know, sometimes like Facebook ads, where you’re doing audience targeting and behavioral aspects are combined in Amazon that has are not like that you can be so granular. So one thing we recommend is we stress, we set up all of our strategies on the campaign level. So when a brand comes to us, we’re going to have campaigns for profitability, we’re going to have campaigns for keyword research, we’re gonna have campaigns for brand defense, and we’re gonna have campaigns for rank or market share. And when we have all of those set up, that means we can take that budget and fluidly adjust based on our needs. So if we have a $20,000 month budget, and this month we’re launching a new products, we’re going to shift more of that budget to be focused on rank. And that’s going to take away from our profitability campaigns, which means we’re probably going to have a higher ACLs. But we’re launching now the moment that becomes steady, we’re going to lower our budget on our rank and move to profitability. So that way, we can be really fluid with those adjustments that make your Amazon advertising aligned with your actual top line goals. Now,
Josh Hadley 28:22
that makes a lot of sense. Now, I think we I could dive in even further with you, we could get into some real nitty gritty stuff here. Maybe that would have to be a part two. Because what I’d like to shift into is, we went through this last year in terms of trying to identify a software solution that could execute a lot of these good strategies. So for our team, you know, we hired an internal PPC Manager, we were formerly with an advertising agency for I think, four years. So we’ve been with them for a long time. But to your point, you know, it’s hard for an agency to really get into the details of every single product and tracking their metrics, and we have 1200 different skews. And we need to you know, we have different strategies that we want to implement kind of exactly what you’re talking about, we have exact match single keyword campaigns, etc. With that being said, that’s more than what one person could do in a single day, right is constantly optimizing and looking at Excel spreadsheets. So we went through the effort of trying to identify what are the best advertising software’s for Amazon? PPC? So destinate you’ve done a lot of research, you’ve said there’s a lot of software services that are claiming to be implementing and utilizing a lot of AI right now and AI is the buzzword of the year and probably of the decade at this point. So what is your take in recommendation for a In an established seven figure business owner that wants to help scale up their ads, they’re willing to invest their own time and resources to do it themselves. What are some of the best software services that you’ve seen to, again, just help manage the amount of data that’s coming through and maybe automate some of those tasks?
Destaney Wishon 30:18
Yeah. So I, again, kind of like starting top down one, the first thing I always ask is like, yes, you have someone dedicated to this, but they do. Do they truly know Amazon ads? Do they know how to set up all the campaigns appropriately? Do they know you know, how deep they need to go? And are they willing to stay up to date with all that, if they say that, then they’re typically going to need a software that allows more rules based automation, more flexibility, that’s kind of one of the biggest barriers I see in the space is, you know, three years ago, it was so easy to set up a tool to optimize for ACLs, right, lower your bids, that’s it, that’s all you need to do is lower your bids frequently and expand your keyword research. Nowadays, again, when you have to bid so high, just to get traffic ACLs is not the best metric to use. So when we’re looking at software’s we typically recommend, okay, if you need something that is, your more advanced you, you really need to know what’s going on, then we typically recommend like, hey, you know, pack these great for market share data analytics, and really understanding rules based automation. But it’s not great if you have no idea how to use advertising console, right? And then you have like scale insights and all these new tools. But really, you need to consider the fact like, Do you need an automation software? Or do you need a software that empowers who’s already managing your team? Now on the flip side, let’s say, Hey, I do need automation software, because we have 10,000 skews, and the person on my team really doesn’t know the differences in everything. That’s when we make recommendations for you know, like, the perpetual was the Tikka metrics, because those are a lot less rules based and a lot more, hey, we’re going to do the ad 20, we’re going to set up the brand campaigns, the category campaigns, the auto campaigns, but let it run on autopilot, which is perfectly fine. You can do either. But that’s kind of the first thing I always recommend to ask yourself. The second thing is, every single tool is pretty much running the exact same insights, you have a few outliers like quartile which just go ahead and carve your own path there. No comments on that. But like everyone’s doing the same. They’re doing bid management, keyword research. So you just got to figure out like what one best fits your system. No one has a truly amazing AI model, because I don’t know the technical perspective that your audience knows. But we’re all getting the same endpoints from the API. And it’s not a lot. Amazon stream was just released in the last like four months. And it’s the first time we’ve actually had hourly data that has never been given to sellers or software companies before it’s all been manipulated and forecasted. So knowing that you can kind of start to see like, Hey, we’re all working with the same thing. No one has this crazy access to real first party data that can be AI, in my opinion, like you can be a really great rules based system. And you can be using, you know, hundreds of millions of data points to like forecast, but I don’t think we’ve really seen the true power of AI with what we have on the Amazon advertising side, DSP, maybe. But that’s a whole another
Josh Hadley 33:20
yes, that yes, that is awesome. Well, I think that is, I think you’ve given a good lay of the land for a brand owner that’s looking to do things in house. But first, you’ve got to determine like, alright, what are your goals and strategies? Who is it that’s going to be leading this? And what’s their level of experience? And, you know, fortunately, just so the audience knows, we ended up going with PAC view, because of what you mentioned, it’s rules based automation. And so it allows us to, again, to execute the exact strategies that Destaney’s talking about where we have single keyword exact match campaigns, we are able to say, alright, this keyword is crushing it with our conversion rate. Let’s double down on this one, we’re going to increase our top of search adjustment, we’re going to increase our budget and you can set up all of these rules to execute within pack view, but you need somebody like you said, I think first and foremost, you’ve got to have somebody that he knows Amazon advertising, don’t grab somebody that just like yeah, sure, I’ll learn it as we go. You’re gonna stumble over yourself using something like tacview
Destaney Wishon 34:25
Paki is powerful. I mean, it’s probably one of the most innovative solutions in the space that I would say. But that can be also very, very dangerous, because you don’t need some brands do if you have the right person, but if you give PAC view to like anyone off the street, then it can be really overwhelming because I mean, they go deep in everything. They have tagging, sub tagging, which is 90 times better than portfolios, but then they also have share voice tracking, which is another solution to your organic rank problem. But you again, it doesn’t make a PPC errs job easier, in my opinion, and that’s where I like I have to have a hard conversation with brands like, look, the person managing your ads doesn’t know the depth of knowledge needed to really make a solution like pack view. Amazing. Like, that’s where, hey, let me go on something automated. And then once you’re ready, you can figure out what the next step is. I
Josh Hadley 35:14
think those are those are some excellent words of wisdom. Destaney, what recommendation, you’re obviously an Amazon advertising agency owner. So who do you feel like is best suited to work with agencies? And what are your recommendations to point people towards agencies rather than doing it in house?
Destaney Wishon 35:33
Yeah, I actually have a LinkedIn post coming out on a similar topic of this today. Agencies are difficult to scale, I’m gonna be really raw and transparent kind of hit on some of the problems that you hit on earlier. We don’t have near as much margin as what I think people like to think we do. Like we’re not like a SaaS solution, right? So the easiest way to increase an agency’s margin is typically to put too much on an employee’s plate. You know, I think that’s a question I get all the time is, how many accounts does your team manage? The second way is to outsource talent, all right, to have virtual assistants working and running the majority of the business, we’ve chosen to grow slow, in order to make sure neither of those things happen. Like we work with a certain size of brands that needs strategically leadership and management. That’s kind of the first thing I’d say if you’re, if you’re running your Amazon ads, and you think you need that like strategic thought leadership, not just a yes man or an assistant running your ads, that’s when an agency is usually great, because they manage category insights on advanced Amazon partners. So that means we get to see the roadmap for everything being rolled out, and we get to help lead our brands, hey, this is coming. build this out within your team. That’s a that’s a big one. And then I would say like the second one is, again, if you’re not good at PPC, hiring someone in house can be a great fit. But again, it comes down to like margin, and employee salary and house can get very expensive very fast. So it kind of comes down to like what you’re looking at from a value of your time value of your money, and whether or not you’re ready for like that next level leadership and the strategy that goes into Amazon ads, because again, it’s it’s a lot more complex than what it was six years ago, we have video assets that can be shown on Fire tablets that can be ran with an advertising console. Now, you have sponsored display, video ads, you have lifestyle images that can be added to sponsor brand ads, you have store spotlight traffic, it’s just gotten so much more complex. And the bigger brands have to do all those little things, right, in order to have a competitive advantage.
Josh Hadley 37:41
I think those those are some important notes there, Destaney, especially in the aspect of you have you yourself, as the entrepreneur need to decide what it is that you want in the type of business that you’re trying to create. Because if you do want to, you know, if you’re okay, staying in that seven figure range, like to be honest with you, you know, you probably don’t need somebody in house, right? Working with an agency, you don’t have to worry about the overhead, you don’t have to worry about your systems and processes, so to speak, with having to manage that person, keep them on track, keep them motivated. Everything that comes with, you know, actual team building and leadership and organization structure and a business. But if you want to scale to eight figures and beyond, and you do see like, hey, I need to have somebody in house, this is what I want to kind of grow because I see us, you know, hopefully becoming $100 million brand, although there’s many 100 million dollar brands that are working with agencies as well. So you’ve got to kind of pick your poison. And again, I think if you don’t know the first things about Amazon advertising, it’s probably best that you’re not seeing the person that’s going to be managing that and providing them with direction.
Destaney Wishon 38:58
You know, that’s a also just a good point. It’s one as anything with entrepreneurship, it’s knowing your strengths and your weaknesses. But to knowing your team’s strengths and weaknesses, there’s a shortage of good Amazon advertising talent. So it’s, it’s like, Hey, if you can find someone that is actually well versed in this, you need to be willing to pay for it. So you have the cost of a software that you’re running, and then you have the cost of your in house talent that you hope is good enough. So that’s definitely a variable, like all it comes down to, like you said is kind of knowing where the holes are in your team and filling those if a software can fill it fantastic. If you don’t have anyone who can tell you the difference in a match type or an ad type. It’s like okay, let’s start looking at either outsourcing to an agency or bringing someone in house that is well versed and I’m willing to pay them enough to keep
Josh Hadley 39:44
up with it. Yep. Great feedback. Now one final question as we start to wrap up here, Destaney. With Amazon, Amazon’s doubling down on the advertising side of things. What do you if you were to make predictions and what the future holds over the next three years for Amazon advertising, what do you think comes our way, over the next three years,
Destaney Wishon 40:06
I would say there’s three big focuses from Amazon. One is on brands building, Amazon’s releasing a ton of new ad types and just general brand assets. They no longer want just sellers selling a me too product with a slight distinction and color variation, they want to really give value to the people who are investing in brands and solving consumer problems and then telling that story. So I think that’s the biggest thing is really knowing your audience and customizing your advertising in your listings for that audience, because that’s again, gonna increase your conversion rate, because you’re being more precise. The second biggest thing is more access to data. So Amazon Marketing stream was a huge rollout in this area, because it gave us access to hourly insights for the first time ever. Anyone who says they were de partie, in the last four years was giving you fake data, we actually have that insight. Now, we also have access to Amazon Marketing Cloud, which can allow us to build our own attribution models, it can allow us to see past the purchase and tie in retail engagements, which is the biggest value add, we can say, hey, this person walked in Whole Foods and bought because they saw this ad, they’re just more data in general across the board. The third thing I’m gonna say is searches obviously oversaturated with ads, all of page one is a sponsored ad, one way or another. Well, that’s not going to last because that’s valuable real estate. So it just becomes paid up likes, it’s an auction model, Amazon is trying to open up more inventory on their display network to diversify that traffic in those CPCs. elsewhere. So DSP sponsor display, Ott, which is Amazon’s over the top video, all of those things are going to be given more, more power, and brands are going to have easier accessibility for those. So that way, they can continue to spend money without paying to play they want, you know, Amazon wants us to spend the same amount of money and drive more value. So that way we can continue to
Josh Hadley 42:01
that makes a lot of sense. Well, long story short, is a hold on to your britches, because you’re gonna get more data and it’s getting more complicated, right?
Destaney Wishon 42:12
Everything’s gonna be more overwhelming for at least two weeks, we
Josh Hadley 42:15
have aI right to help us out. Yes. All right, Destaney. So what I love to do is I’d love to leave our audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode, here are the three takeaways that I noted destinate, let me know if you think I’m missing something. But number one, an action item that a brand owner needs to take is start paying attention to your brand metrics. Today, if this is something that you have not been doing, and you didn’t even know about brand metrics to begin with, this is something you need to dive into. And you need to start creating your strategies for your products or your product categories, based on the data that you’re seeing in brand metrics, like Destaney talked about, if your conversion rate is below the category average, then you probably need to spend some time focused on your listing optimization. If on the other hand, you’re crushing the, you know, the category average, then go double down on some of these advertising strategies that we talked about today and help it boost your organic ranking. So that’s action item number one, action item number two would be diving in and having a mindset shift with the old, you know, way of getting products ranked of search, find by giveaways, all of the things that used to be done five years ago, you’re now effectively able to do that. But doing that through, you know, white hat tactics of Amazon advertising, and having that mindset shift to say, hey, yeah, I might be losing money on this particular keyword. But through our conversation today, you should be able to track your organic ranking increase from that to ensure that you’re, you’re losing money, but at the end of the day, it’s actually boosting your organic ranking. And so it’s overall worth it, just like all of the old search, find buy strategies where you are losing money, but you knew it was worth it. So last but not least the third action item is that with Amazon advertising, this is not something that you can sit idly by and say, Well, I don’t really want to invest in an agency, I don’t want to necessarily invest in, you know, an internal team. If you take that approach, and you’re like, I’ll turn on some auto campaigns and just see what happens. You are going to get smoked by sellers like myself, or everybody else that is following the strategies that Destaney just laid out today. Because Amazon is becoming more of a pay to play. And if especially as it relates to organic rankings and being able to support that you will lose to a brand like myself that is focused on hey, I might be losing money here, but I know it’s supporting my organic ranking, because we’ve gotten that detailed in our reporting. That’s gonna be hard for you to be if you’re just turning on an auto campaign or trying to pull the sheets over your head and pretend that Amazon advertising doesn’t exist. So, Destaney, is there anything else that we failed to mention here?
Destaney Wishon 45:13
Man, I think that was a perfect summation. We could go 20 layers deeper for every single one. But I think that was the best way to, you know, concisely
Josh Hadley 45:23
shut off. Well, Destaney, I love to to ask every guest these three questions. So the first question is what has been the most influential book that you’ve read and why
Destaney Wishon 45:32
I would say How to Win Friends and Influence People was one of my favorite books as well, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People like combining those two has helped me just be a better human. And I think with everything that we do, you know, all of business comes down to people to people connection. And those two books were really the foundation I needed to, you know, kind of kick out lover
Josh Hadley 45:55
Love those books as well. Next question, what is a new or game changing software that you’ve recently come across that you think is going to be a game changer,
Destaney Wishon 46:05
I’m gonna say ChatGPT, even though everyone’s probably tired of hearing it and seeing it on social, just because we found some really unique ways to tie it into our business. You know, as fun as in our kind of Slack channels, we were creating a ton of songs for each other, based on these like random absolute, like variables. We’re making them for the team, just from a culture perspective. And we had so much fun for like, hey, let’s do a podcast, Intro jingle and all of these. But on a more actionable level, I mean, the insights they can pull, and they can help with category research and keyword research and understanding what your unique value proposition is. All of those things, I think are gonna unlock potential for the people who know how to utilize Totally agree
Josh Hadley 46:47
yet again, another podcast episode in and of itself, right? Yeah. All right. Last and final question here, Destaney is who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other sellers should be following and why?
Destaney Wishon 47:02
So I will say, I’ve been incredibly grateful with how amazing the community is, in general. And I know that’s a little bit of an out of an answer. But going to conferences, and just being open minded and willing to give back, I could not name how many people have stepped in and helped me or given me advice along the way. So like, put yourself out there, don’t look at a conference and think, Okay, I’m not buying a ticket, because the strategies shared aren’t going to be worthwhile. It’s not about that, in my opinion, I have sat down with sellers who have given me the most amazing operational advice. And I’ve built a really great network on LinkedIn. And I think that’s been really powerful. If people are looking for specifics, I made a post about this yesterday with my top 10. I recommend and I’ll send it to you, so anyone else can reach out and follow, but 90% of people I’ve met in the community have been willing to help in any which way. And I think I’ve been very thankful. So
Josh Hadley 47:57
we’ll have to link your LinkedIn post to the comments here in the in the notes. Okay. Well, Destaney, thank you so much for your valuable time today. If people want to learn more about BetterAMS and follow you, and I think you’re even willing to do a free brand audit for them. Where can people reach out to you?
Destaney Wishon 48:18
So the best place is betterams.com. If you’re interested in anything on the agency, we post, our whole team has a ton of content, LinkedIn, YouTube, and if you ever have any questions, just feel free to reach out, we try to get back to everyone, I’ll say try, because I get a lot of random q&a is after things like this. And yeah, if you’re ever interested in just running an audit, we try to audit as many brands as we can, and really just provide as much valuable insights and feedback as possible. Regardless if we’re going to work with them or not. I mean, we’re not for the long term, ecommerce isn’t going anywhere. So as long as we build strong relationships, that’s what
Josh Hadley 48:54
I love best. Well, I definitely encourage everybody to go follow Destaney. Again, she puts out a lot of great YouTube content, LinkedIn posts, so follow her along there, even if you don’t need an advertising agency right now. If you’re in the market for an advertising agency, go check out BetterAMS. So, Destaney, thank you for your time today.
Destaney Wishon 49:13
Amazing. Thank you so much, Josh.
Outro 49:17
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