In this episode, host Josh interviews Matt Altman, marketplace lead at Right Side Up, about advanced strategies for launching and scaling brands on Amazon. Matt shares actionable insights on budgeting for product launches, optimizing PPC campaigns by focusing on conversion rates, and leveraging Amazon’s internal data tools. He emphasizes the importance of consistently launching new, non-competing products to avoid cannibalization and drive growth. The discussion concludes with practical takeaways for sellers aiming to scale, plus an offer for a free brand audit from Matt’s agency, Right Side Up.
Chapters:
Introduction to Matt Altman and Right Side Up (00:00:00)
Josh introduces Matt Altman, his background, and the success of his agency, Right Side Up.
Current Product Launch Strategies on Amazon (00:00:31)
Matt discusses effective modern tactics for launching new products and the importance of a sufficient launch budget.
Budgeting for Product Launches (00:01:02)
Explanation of current budget requirements, category selection, and why launch budgets have increased.
Estimating Launch Budgets and Pre-Launch Data Collection (00:02:54)
How to estimate launch budgets, use Amazon Ads, and gather pre-launch data using search query reports.
Leveraging Search Query Performance Reports (00:04:14)
Matt explains the value of Amazon’s search query performance reports versus brand analytics.
Keyword Targeting and PPC Campaign Setup (00:05:19)
Details on targeting specific keywords, campaign types, and optimizing for conversion rates over ACOS/TACOS.
ASIN Targeting and Relevancy Building (00:07:44)
Using ASIN targeting campaigns to build relevancy for launch keywords and leveraging historical data.
Scaling to Eight Figures and Beyond (00:08:09)
Advice for established sellers on scaling, focusing on new product launches, and avoiding complacency.
Avoiding Product Cannibalization and Diversifying Product Lines (00:10:41)
Strategies to prevent keyword overlap, expand product lines, and increase brand reach without cannibalizing sales.
Actionable Takeaways for Sellers (00:12:54)
Josh summarizes three main takeaways: aggressive product launches, PPC optimization via conversion rates, and image optimization.
Strategic Delegation and Removing Bottlenecks (00:15:04)
Matt advises stepping back, identifying bottlenecks, and delegating to scale the business effectively.
Conclusion and Free Audit Offer (00:16:20)
Matt shares where listeners can learn more and offers a free audit for podcast listeners.
Links and Mentions:
Tools
Right Side Up
Amazon Search Query Reports
Brand Analytics
Pacvue
Ecom Analytics
Data Dive
Transcript:
Josh 00:00:00 Today, I’m super excited to introduce you to Matt Altman. Matt leads the marketplace at right side up. Matt has over 12 years of selling experience. He’s launched and sold multiple personal brands, all starting from a retail arbitrage budget. Four years ago, he started an agency right Side up to help high growth CPG brands focus on dominating the marketplace. They’ve been able to scale many brands from 0 to 3 million in monthly sales. Welcome to the podcast, Matt.
Matt 00:00:29 Thanks for having me. Josh, how are you doing?
Josh 00:00:31 Doing great. What are some of the key things that you, you advise or recommend when launching a brand new product on Amazon that are working today? Because, as you know, a lot of those black hat tactics, you know, have come and gone. you also have the, you know, the rebates that everybody was doing, and now it’s kind of leveled the playing field a little bit more. Tell me what you’re doing that’s been working for you guys.
Matt 00:00:55 Yeah. So first off, I think that the biggest thing is making sure you have a big enough budget to launch your products.
Matt 00:01:02 like the days of 5 to $10,000 budgets to launch products are just gone in my eyes, at least in the spaces that I work in. so we usually overestimate our budgets by like 20 to 30% of what we actually think it would be just to make sure that we’re in a good place in case it doesn’t go the way that we want it to. but outside of that, we’re looking for a couple of major things. one is we want to see continued growth in the category. Amazon’s making that way easier now with like the search query reports, the product Opportunity Explorer. There’s so many internal tools that they’re giving you access to now that you can really easily find that. And then the other big thing that we’re looking for is categories that you’ve got maybe like 3 or 4 power players in. And by power players they aren’t really doing that much. They’re still kind of growing, but they’re ahead of like the other 20 items there. really it just kind of is showing us that, hey, there’s enough sales to go around.
Matt 00:02:01 If these four people can all kind of be around the same and customers really don’t care which one they’re choosing right now, they’re just basically picking whichever ones at the top from what we can see. So yeah, we used to go into very heavy like categories where you would just, I mean, like launches would be half 1 million to $1 million. Wow. and if you could make them work. Yeah. The payback is amazing because of the volume that some of those categories do. But if you lose, like, it absolutely sucks. so for sure, what we’re looking at like 50 to $75,000, to launch a product right now and the supplement space that we’re kind of going after, and we’ve seen it, it’s kind of the sweet spot for everything. so if we do find a product and we think it’s going to cost more than that to actually launch it, we’ll hold off for a bit and see if we can find some other ones that are within our kind of thresholds.
Josh 00:02:53 That makes sense.
Josh 00:02:54 So how do you estimate, you know, that budget, right. What’s the difference between a half 1 million to $1 million product launch budget versus something that’s 50 to $75,000? And how do you estimate that?
Matt 00:03:07 Yeah. So the biggest thing is ads. I mean, we’ve really in the last like three months, all of our launches have been almost exclusively on Amazon through Amazon Ads. so we’re pulling averages of cost per clicks through the advertising API and really just looking at, okay, what is the conversion rate of the top products? If we wanted to spend to get that conversion rate on that keyword, like what would it cost us per day and working that backwards? the other big thing that I don’t know anyone else that’s kind of touched on this, but what we what we’ve been doing here recently is we have a seller account where we’ll create the product beforehand. It’s not the product that we’re actually going to sell. We’ll put some items as merchant fulfilled, and then we’ll just have ourselves by the products.
Matt 00:03:54 So that way we get all the search query report data for that product before we actually launch it.
Josh 00:03:58 Oh, that’s fascinating. So you do that in a separate account then? Is that what you’re saying?
Matt 00:04:03 We’ve been doing it in the same account, just like a different brand name. and throw up a listing merchant fulfilled and do a couple buys through it, and then you get all that data.
Josh 00:04:14 Interesting. Okay, so then you’re going for the search query performance reports from Amazon, right? Correct. What are the additional data points that you get from the search query performance that you wouldn’t get normally just looking at brand analytics, right.
Matt 00:04:29 Yeah. So really the big things we focus on are you obviously get the add to cart, the click through rate, the overall impression rates, things like that. But taking those out and breaking them down like a lot of people always kind of go by that old method of I need this many buys per keyword per day. And they were just like, oh, we need to add in some add to carts here and there to make it all look kosher.
Matt 00:04:52 through the search query report, you can basically know exactly how many add to cart you need, how many detailed page views you need, and then you can equate that out to the exact same for the top sellers. If you marry the brand analytics data into it, and basically it’ll tell you exactly you’ve got to hit between these three numbers each day. For we’ve been seeing like 25 to 30 days is how long we usually like launch on a certain keyword. And then you’ll pretty much stay ranked like we haven’t really had any issues.
Josh 00:05:19 Interesting. Okay, so you’re targeting specific keywords right out of the gate, right? So if we drive, you know, dive a little deeper here. If you you’re launching a particular product, you’ve probably got hundreds of keywords that you could focus on. Right. But are you coming out with auto campaigns and broad campaigns from the get go, like tell us, you know, what type of ad campaigns you’re launching, how many keywords are you focusing on? And in that.
Matt 00:05:47 Yeah. So for the first like 35 to 40 days, we launch two campaigns. there might be more than two campaigns. It depends on the volume of the exact match terms that you’re going after. If they’re super high, volume will break those keywords out. Just let it spend a little bit more efficiently. But really the main focus is taking those top keywords for that product. as long as our budget can withstand them, usually we always go for the top ones we’ve seen. Yeah, you can go for the long tail ones. You can extend this launch out, and it may take you 90, 120 days to get to where you want to go to, but we’d rather spend the budget up front and get there as quickly as possible. but what we do set up exact match campaigns. We set the bid at the, suggested bid from Amazon, and then we put in a 300% top of search modifier. basically, we wait 2 to 3 days, pull the data out, and we’re using Pacvue right now to do this.
Matt 00:06:46 But you can easily do this in just a bulk sheet if you want to do that. but we’re pulling out that data and then we’re comparing our conversion rates on products or sorry non products on keywords by the brand analytics data. Day by day to see kind of are we matching the brand analytics like conversion rate or sales rate. And if we are we keep spending it against that keyword. If we aren’t we decrease the bid and then we basically just keep doing that every 2 to 3 days. We don’t worry about ACOs, we don’t worry about tacos, we don’t worry about anything except for our conversion rate. As long as our conversion rate is within two percentage points of the brand analytics conversion rate for the top couple people, we keep running that keyword until we are either ranked in the top three, or we just fall off completely because Amazon didn’t find us relevant. then the second campaign that we launched is a sponsored product campaign as well. But we do Asin targeting, and basically we’ll take those 5 to 7 keywords that we’re targeting in our launch.
Matt 00:07:44 And we use Ecom analytics for this. But you can do it through the API or brand analytics yourself. but we pull the Weekly data going back for the last 12 months, and we target any and that’s ever been in the top three for the 5 to 7 keywords that we’re going after. And we’re hoping that that gives us relevancy towards those keywords as well, and those other products that are converting well for those keywords.
Josh 00:08:09 For our audience. They’re established sellers, right? They’re looking to go to that next level. They want to break into eight figures and beyond. So, Matt, with your experience, you’ve done a lot of deal due diligence for some huge brands as well. What is it that you would recommend for those people that want to move to eight figures and beyond? What should they be focused on?
Matt 00:08:30 Yeah, so I actually get this question a lot. And I think the biggest thing is a lot of us as Amazon sellers get caught up in our day to day, and we kind of get like, you get a taste of success and you get this superiority complex, like happened to me, happened to a lot of people that I know.
Matt 00:08:48 And at the end of the day, that’s only going to cause problems. it’s when you start kind of twiddling your thumbs and you’re doing stupid things like, should I add this product to this variation? Should I add this color? And like, none of these are going to move the needle incrementally in your business. Like you can add 20 different colors. It’s not going to make a difference. so really focusing on new products and launching new products, we try and launch 4 to 5 new products a month. And if they don’t perform, we kill them within three months. Like it’s a very quick to market, quick to kill. And what we’ve seen though is Amazon favors that, like all of our old products, will get a huge boost when we are consistently launching new products on that brand. like tremendous bumps. It’s actually really surprising. And if you read some of the, the Amazon like science papers, I don’t know if you’ve ever gone there. It’s like Amazon sciences. If you Google it, you can find it.
Matt 00:09:44 and then search for I think it’s called cold starts. just search cold start and you’ll find it. But it’s basically a white paper on the patent and how the algorithm works for Amazon. And one of the key things is how many new products is this brand launching? so they’re weighing that in and they’re looking at as a brand. How many units do you sell on a monthly basis? How is that increasing month over month? So as long as you’re launching new products, that should always be somewhat increasing. So you get favorable, benefit from Amazon. But the other big piece that I’ve seen, and this is something that we just I would say like, yeah, it’s probably been about a year now that we finally figured this out. And it was like, man, why did we not think of this before? So like, pretend you’re selling in the Guardian niche and you sell like one of those extendable hoses because I see those everywhere. at the end of the day, if you continue to launch products in that niche, you’re going to launch.
Matt 00:10:41 Let’s do like an attachment for the hose, like a spray nozzle. You’re going to have an overlapping keyword subsegment of like 78 to 80% of your keywords, because a lot of those products are come with a free attachment. It’s like their free offer when you buy the product kind of thing. What we do now and we use Data Dive and actually a couple other tools to do this, but we look and see, okay, right now, how many keywords are we ranking in the top ten for this entire brand? What are those keywords? Here’s the 30 products in our product opportunity list. The top sellers for each of those keywords or each of those like sub segments. Where are they ranking and what is that overlapping keyword relevancy. So we’re now instead of launching like the next logical product as of that hose attachment, we’re going to go to like a garden kneeling stance. It’s still in the same vertical. You can still brand it under the same brand. But that’s almost 100% like non competing search traffic.
Matt 00:11:40 And you’re basically, in a roundabout way, increasing your traffic back to your original listing. Because if you’re buying like a kneeling stand for the garden. More than likely, you’re going to need a hose at some point, so you’re just continuing to build your brand kind of outreach through these new products without overlapping the same customers that you currently have.
Josh 00:12:01 Yeah. And you’re and you would kind of advise against trying to create products that overlap on the same keywords, because then you just start, you know, eating away, I guess some cannibalization. Right? And then you start destroying your own organic ranking. Is that correct?
Matt 00:12:15 Yeah. So like our main brand, we sell low carb keto snacks. If you search keto snack like we buy the top, like for ad placements 90% of the day, every day. because all of our products kind of relate to their one product in that like line of, I think we have seven keto products now. One product gets 80% of the sales for that keyword. No matter what we do, it doesn’t matter if we switch the ad spend to higher on the ones that don’t normally get those sales, it still goes to that one.
Matt 00:12:42 So we’re kind of like stepping away from keto products now as a whole and working on different like dietary restrictions, just to extend our reach a bit more, but it try and make it as varied as possible.
Josh 00:12:54 Yeah, fascinating. I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here are three takeaways that I noted. Matt. So let me know if I’m missing something. I mean, we could go. This list could honestly be like 100 takeaways from today, but the three that I kind of highlighted and these are big overarching themes. And then you could, you know, dive deeper into these. But I think number one takeaway is you have to be launching new products aggressively right quick to launch and then quick to kill products. That’s your number one takeaway. If you’re not focused on finding your next new product, you’re already behind the eight ball. You should always have a pipeline of, you know, 18 months, two years, three years worth of products that you know you’re going to be coming out with.
Josh 00:13:40 Number two is focused on PPC optimization when launching a product and getting and getting rid of the whole thought process of what’s my ACOs? What’s my tacos percentage? Remove that and focus more on what is my conversion rate for those specific keywords, and how is that comparing to my competitors. And you can see all of that data in brand analytics. I think that’s a big mindset shift that people need to implement today with their PPC campaigns, because you could forever spend money on a keyword, but if your conversion rate is bad, well, good luck trying to improve that performance of that, right? Yep. and then last thing that I have here, as an action item is optimization. And one of the first things that you should be doing in terms of product optimization is focused on that primary image. And then depending on where Amazon goes with this, you know, flipping to a first and second image in the search results, focus on that primary image and then even your secondary image, making sure that it’s readable.
Josh 00:14:46 It’s easy to understand. Quick hit. Somebody can look at it within a second. They understand what that product’s about, conveys a lot of value to them. In differentiating yourselves. Then we have a lot of software tools that you shared with us as well, to be able to implement many of these tactics here today. Matt.
Matt 00:15:04 I think the only other thing that I would add is really step back from your business and think strategically about what you’re doing in your day to day. We did this a couple of years ago and actually found out I was the bottleneck in like 90% of everything that was either not getting done or getting like tossed to the side for that period. and really either hire good talent that you can remove yourself from those pieces or rework the way that you’re doing some of these processes to remove yourself in that bottleneck, because it’s you don’t realize where most of your time is going throughout the day, and it you get stuck doing the same stuff that doesn’t really actually move the needle.
Josh 00:15:47 Yep.
Josh 00:15:48 I could 100% agree with you on that statement. I think us as entrepreneurs battle with that on an ongoing basis, and you move into something new and you start figuring that out and you have to do that time study and start offloading, delegating more and continue climbing and moving on further. Great takeaway. Matt, thank you so much for your time. This was a lot of valuable information. Where can people go to learn more about you? your agency and I think you also have a free gift as, like a free audit that you were going to give people, right?
Matt 00:16:20 Yeah, yeah. so you can find out more about us and our agency just by going to, right. Meetup.com. and if you fill out the Contact Us form down below, we, we are offering free audits, to anyone that listens to the podcast. So just mention that and we’ll go ahead and get that taken care of for you.
Josh 00:16:40 Awesome. Thanks again for joining us, Matt, and we’ll chat with you again soon.
Matt 00:16:45 Sounds good. Thanks for having me.
