?? Pathfinder Bulletin - July Recap 2022

Fresh Amazon Info??

Amazon Backend Keywords: A Guide To Maximizing Visibility

If you haven't recently explored your backend keywords, this is probably a good time to do so ahead of Q4.

Keywords have played a huge role in visibility on Amazon since day one, backend keywords being one of those foundational fields. While these keywords don't appear on the "front end" for shoppers to see, they play an important role in making your listings relevant.

In this article, we give you a list of do's and dont's when creating your own backend keywords, the different ways to find them, how to add backend keywords on Amazon, how to determine whether your backend keywords are being indexed, and the benefits of having backend keywords in your Amazon listings.

How We Built a Well-Themed Branded Storefront [Purify Life]

Here’s an example of an Amazon storefront built to convert (Shout out to Elena and Angel from the Storefront Design Team)

Even though this is for a CPG supplement brand, many of the best practices used in this design can be applied with brands that either offer a lot of accessories and options or a list of tiered products (ie. from basic to premium).

If you’re looking to improve your Storefront conversion rate using ad placements like Sponsored Brands, then a storefront refresh like this can really help.

See how we approach a clean, modern, and friendly Amazon Storefront design that’s built to leave more than just a good first impression. View Storefront Here.

What makes Amazon Ad Strategies Profitable in 2022 [Let's Talk Exits Podcast]

I was thrilled that Meny asked me to join him on the Let's Talk Exits podcast. As he's a gregarious host it went great and we talked:

• The state of Amazon PPC in 2022
• The eternal question of how much to spend and what brands should focus on
• The Golden Era of Amazon advertising is over
• Google to Amazon traffic
• Creating company culture with intention

Then he surprised me with 4 rapid-fire questions. Listen and enjoy!

Amazon’s New Expanded Product Targeting: How Do I Make the Most of It? [The PPC Den Podcast]

Mike and I took this episode to consider the capabilities of Amazon’s new feature, Expanded Product Targeting. It’s a bit like a broad match or even auto campaign for product targeting because it allows you to target substitutes, compliments, and other "relevant" items shoppers may browse.

This is potentially great for non-PPCers who don't want to deal with the legwork of building a target list or a brand in an aggressive growth phase but proceed with caution if you’re an Amazon PPC Manager because this could be a quick way to waste ad spend if poorly configured and not carefully watched.

Catch my Keynote at MXNEY WORLD 4.0!

Join me, virtually, on August 24th as I share my knowledge about scaling your sales and revenue through Amazon Advertising at MXNEY WORLD 4.0, Northern Europe's largest virtual eCommerce conference.

Scale Your Business With Amazon Advertising

(Day 1: August 24, 2022 11:20 AM - 12:05 AM CET)

During my segment at the MXNEY WORLD 4.0 event, I will discuss topics related to Amazon Advertising this 2022 such as getting visibility on Amazon, understanding the internal and external forces that impact Amazon Advertising, the opportunities and challenges of Amazon Advertising, and strategies that Amazon Sellers can try to get ahead in the Marketplace.

What is MXNEY WORLD 4.0?

Hosted by the Danish eCommerce investment company, MXNEY, the MXNEY WORLD 4.0 is considered the biggest eCommerce event in Scandinavia. Created for empowering eCommerce entrepreneurs, the online event will be held from August 24th to the 26th through MXNEY’s own conference platform. The online event will showcase panel debates, keynotes, and various entertainment features such as eCommerce comedy shows, breakout rooms, networking opportunities, and many more. Get your ticket here.

Amazon News ??

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE: Amazon slashing private label brands (or are they?)...

• Source A: They Are
• Source B: They Aren't

In the same week, two conflicting narratives arose on this subject.

The WSJ claims that Amazon is reducing their portfolio of PL brands based on guidance from top executives while Marketplace Pulse simply isn't seeing the data to back that assertion.

Regulatory pressure may be the biggest factor here but no doubt many of the PL lines that Amazon has launched have little traction.

Many of those are not under brand names that are easily recognizable as even being owned by Amazon but can be sussed out by a Chrome extension as covered in an earlier edition of this newsletter.

Sometimes overlooked in this discussion is the fact that brick-and-mortar retailers have been learning what sells well in their stores and coming up with their own in-house alternatives for decades.

Walmart and Target are specifically mentioned in this article.

When Amazon does this it’s perceived as sinister, and, I speculate the reason why is how aggressively they push those in-house products which end up competing with 3P products for placement that would typically be paid-for positions.

Amazon cracks down on fake review Facebook groups

The endless struggle against review manipulation and to retain consumer trust in Amazon continues.

This was a particularly big crackdown across thousands of groups on social media and in multiple languages so good on Amazon for being proactive.

I know If I were running such a group and saw several people I know get hit with the threat of a lawsuit I would stop and reconsider.

Hopefully, this has the intended chilling effect on this part of our industry.

The 2 Top Twitter Threads This Month:

• The DTC strategy of Simple Modern by @jBryanPorter
• Decoding those strange brand names by @ColeSouth

Here are two Twitter threads worth reading.

That from Bryan is an excellent clear-eyed look at DTC brand strategy while the one from Cole goes into why the heck the Amazon marketplace is flooded with brands with strange names like DOTTAVR (sorry, not a cool mountain in Iceland) which is having the impact of eroding that elusive shopper trust we always talk about, and tops it off with some spicy black-hat tactics ???

2022 eCommerce Trends Report from eCommerce Fuel

With data collected from over 600 large eCommerce brands, this report is one worth digging into. It of course includes a section about the unavoidable Amazon (or perhaps the question of Peak Amazon).

Merchants responding to the questionnaire were more likely to report paid traffic as one of their top acquisition channels versus previous years despite it being less effective due to privacy changes impacting Facebook and rising ad costs for other platforms.

Regardless, Amazon advertising is still marked as one of the more effective paid channels.

My biggest takeaway was that the Manufacturing + Storytelling DTC model is the winning play in 2022, as opposed to business models like white labeling, wholesaling, or even dropshipping (who dropships anymore?!).

Brands and Agencies turn to Amazon as other ad platforms falter

Related to the iOS privacy changes impacting Facebook is the secondary effect of more ad spend flowing to Amazon on both the Sponsored Ads and ADSP platforms.

With the slow decline of 3rd party cookies in browsers and changes to major mobile operating systems, the first-party data that Amazon has starts to look increasingly appealing and many are finding higher ROAS advertising there.

Tools like AMC, which we’ve only last week started to experiment with at Pathfinder, will help us understand the customer journey through unlocking that first-party data across the different ad platforms Amazon offers. This is still in its early days but is the thing I'm the most excited about right now.

I have a theory that a growing percentage of the population is using content or adblockers, VPNs with filters or simply have 3rd party cookies or scripting disabled in-browser making accurate online tracking and ad delivery far more difficult.

As each subsequent generation is increasingly tech-savvy I see it as a natural outcome. First-party data availability circumvents some of those measures.

Nerd Zone ??

Requesting your own data from Amazon

I tried something a bit different this past month and want to share my experience.

Following instructions found by a simple Google search, I requested that Amazon give me a copy of ALL the data it has on me.

If you try this I recommend using your personal Amazon account not that linked to your professional seller account.

After issuing my request I was told they’d be in touch 7 - 9 days later. Sure enough about a week later I received an email letting me know "Your personal data is ready to download" and would be available for the next 90 days.

Following the link, I was faced with a page where I had 189 separate zip files to choose from which contained a wide variety of spreadsheets and file types some of which I didn't even recognize.

Some of them had clear names like the csv that contained info on what I’ve highlighted on my Kindle to the totally inscrutable like "Retail.CommunityShopping.SocialGamification.zip" ??

The most interesting of all these was "Retail.Search-Data.zip" which sure enough has my actual search term history along with 63 other data fields relating to each of those queries going back all the way to early 2020.

Why do I bring this up? Well, if Amazon has the exact date, time, device, and color recorded for each instance of me highlighting something I wanted to refer to later on my Kindle, imagine the level of data that they can build from years of search history and all the other related customer behavior they've been diligently recording. Imagine the accuracy of the targeting assumptions they can make about my interests and buying habits and me as an individual.

That's all for this month. Thanks for reading! - Brent

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