In this episode, Josh interviews Destaney, CEO of Better AMS, about advanced Amazon advertising strategies. Destaney shares insights on setting ad budgets based on brand goals, structuring campaigns for profitability and growth, and the importance of campaign-level organization. They discuss the challenges of managing large SKU counts and the need for software tools like Pacvue, highlighting that expertise is crucial to leverage such platforms. Destaney emphasizes using data-driven, white-hat strategies and staying proactive with Amazon ads. The episode wraps up with actionable tips and an invitation to connect with Better AMS for further learning and free brand audits.
Chapters:
Introduction & Guest Background (00:00:00)
Josh introduces Destaney, CEO of Better AMS, and discusses her background in Amazon advertising.
Destaney’s Experience in Amazon Ads (00:00:49)
Destaney shares her journey, starting young in Amazon ads, and her experience managing large ad spends.
Budgeting for Amazon Ads (00:01:23)
Discussion on how brand owners should approach setting budgets for Amazon ads based on goals and growth.
Structuring Campaigns for Different Objectives (00:02:05)
Destaney explains campaign-level structuring for profitability, keyword research, brand defense, and market share.
Fluid Budget Allocation & Campaign Adjustments (00:03:05)
How to fluidly adjust budgets between campaigns based on product launches and changing objectives.
Challenges Managing Many SKUs & Need for Software (00:04:05)
Josh describes the difficulty of managing 1200 SKUs and the need for software to optimize Amazon PPC.
Evaluating Amazon PPC Software & Automation (00:05:14)
Destaney discusses the importance of having knowledgeable staff and choosing the right software for automation.
Advanced vs. Automated Software Solutions (00:07:08)
Recommendations for advanced users (rules-based tools like Pacvue) vs. automated solutions for less experienced teams.
Limitations of AI in Amazon Ad Tools (00:08:10)
Destaney explains the current limitations of AI in Amazon ad software due to restricted data access.
Pacvue & Importance of Expertise (00:09:04)
Josh and Destaney discuss why Pacvue is powerful but requires deep Amazon ad knowledge to use effectively.
Actionable Takeaways for Brand Owners (00:10:33)
Josh summarizes three key action items: focus on brand metrics, shift mindset on ranking strategies, and invest in expertise.
Closing & Where to Find Destaney (00:13:38)
Destaney shares where listeners can follow her and learn more about Better AMS, including free brand audits.
Links and Mentions:
Tools and Software
“Perpetua“: “00:07:08”
“Pacvue“: “00:08:40”
Websites and Social Media
“Better AMS” now BTRMedia: “00:13:52”
“LinkedIn“: “00:13:52”
Transcript:
Josh 00:00:00 Today I’m super excited to introduce you all to Destaney with Sean. Destaney is the CEO of better AMS and better. AMS is a retail media agency managing over $50 million of spend across Walmart and Amazon. So with that, welcome to the show, Destaney.
Destaney 00:00:16 Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Really excited to be here.
Josh 00:00:19 I’m super excited to have you on the show. My team is also excited to have you on the show, because they watch your YouTube videos and all the content that you’re putting out, and oftentimes in our own strategy meetings, it will be, hey, I remember Destaney said this, Destaney said that. And so to have you on the podcast, I’m super excited to have you here. And I think I want to encourage our listeners to pay attention, because Destaney knows what she’s talking about as it relates to Amazon advertising.
Destaney 00:00:49 I hope so. I have been in this space for like six years, and I have done nothing but Amazon ads. So, you know, a lot of people are forced to go wide, whether it’s because you’re brand building or how quickly the industry industry changes.
Destaney 00:01:02 I was super thankful to be thrown into Amazon advertising management at like 22 years old. I think my first large brand was managing around $10 million spend a quarter, so I, I had to learn really fast and this is all I know at this point. So thank you everyone for supporting my content because you are, you know, paying for my meals at night.
Josh 00:01:23 I love it. 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?
Destaney 00:01:53 Yep. Yeah. So a budget’s obviously so dependent on goals and growth and all of those things. So I always struggle to give that. I will say I interviewed a ton of the other agency owners.
Destaney 00:02:05 I think we’re managing in total. I kind of 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 they’re more competitive category, 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. Ads are not like that. You can be so granular. So one thing we recommend is we 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 going to have campaigns for brand defense, and we’re going to have campaigns for rank or market share.
Destaney 00:03:05 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 a month budget and this month we’re launching a new product, 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 ACOs, 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 align with your actual top line sales goals.
Josh 00:03:40 Now 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.
Josh 00:04:05 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’d 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 SKUs. 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 softwares for Amazon PPC. So, Destinee, 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.
Josh 00:05:14 so what is your take in recommendation for, again, 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 00:05:37 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 of 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 ACOs, right.
Destaney 00:06:13 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, ACOs is not the best metric to use. So when we’re looking at softwares, we typically recommend okay. If you need something that is you’re more advanced, you you really need to know what’s going on. Then we typically recommend like hey, you know Parkview is 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 an automation software because we have 10,000 SKUs, and the person on my team really doesn’t know the differences in everything.
Destaney 00:07:08 That’s when we make recommendations for, you know, like the perpetual the take up metrics, because those are a lot less rules based and a lot more, hey, we’re going to do the 80 over 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 are 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 is never been given to sellers or software companies before.
Destaney 00:08:10 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 nother podcast.
Josh 00:08:40 Yeah, 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, all right, 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 Pacvue because of what you mentioned.
Josh 00:09:04 It’s rules based automation. And so it allows us to again do execute the exact strategies that Destaney is talking about. Where we have single keyword exact match campaigns, we are able to say, all right, 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 Parkview. But you need somebody like you said I think the first and foremost, you’ve got to have somebody that knows Amazon advertising don’t grab somebody that is just like, yeah, sure, I’ll learn it as we go. You’re going to stumble over yourself using something like Pacvue.
Destaney 00:09:44 Pacvue vs powerful. I mean, it’s probably one of the most innovative solutions in the space, I would say. But that can be also very, very dangerous because you don’t need some brains do if you have the right person. But if you give Pacvue for you 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.
Destaney 00:10:08 But then they also have share voice tracking, which is another solution to your organic rank problem. But again, it doesn’t make a PPC 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 Pacvue. 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.
Josh 00:10:33 I think those are those are some excellent words of wisdom. What I love to do is I love to leave our audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here are the three takeaways that I noted. Destaney. 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 are seeing in brand metrics like Destaney talked about.
Josh 00:11:12 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 in 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 fine 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, yeah, you’re you’re losing money. But at the end of the day, it’s actually boosting your organic ranking.
Josh 00:12:15 And so it’s overall worth it. Just like all of the old search find buy strategies where you were losing money, but you knew it was worth it. So last but not least, 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 going to be hard for you to beat 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.
Josh 00:13:24 So, Destaney, is there anything else that we failed to mention here?
Destaney 00:13:28 Man, I think that was a perfect summation. We could go 28 layers deeper for every single one, but I think that was the best way to, you know, concisely finish it off.
Josh 00:13:38 Well, Destaney, thank you so much for your valuable time today. If people want to learn more about better AMS and follow you, and I think you’re even willing to do a free brand audit for them. Where could people reach out to you at?
Destaney 00:13:52 So the best place is better. If you’re interested in anything on the agency. We post our whole team, post a ton of content on 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 and A’s 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.
Destaney 00:14:22 I mean, we’re we’re in it for the long term. E-commerce isn’t going anywhere. So as long as we build strong relationships, that’s what matters best.
Josh 00:14:29 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. And if you’re in the market for an advertising agency, go check out better AMS. So Destaney, thank you for your time today.
Destaney 00:14:48 Amazing. Thank you so much, Josh.
