Pathfinder Bulletin - March Recap 2022
AMZ Pathfinder
We help great brands scale with Amazon advertising | Amazon PPC Management | Amazon DSP Services | Amazon Store Builder
Company Updates
Amazon listing optimization remains a balance between satisfying Amazon's search algorithm and quickly providing relevant information to shoppers so that they pick the best product (hopefully yours!).
In this video, we talk to CRO expert Quinn Zeda from?Conversion Crimes?who shares her insights on how to optimize your Amazon listings with?user testing tools. Stop guessing what needs to change on your product listing and get quality feedback from actual Amazon shoppers in video form.
P.S. If you’re looking for more badass insights on growth and advertising,?subscribe to our YouTube channel. We will bring on experts to share ideas and strategies outside of our usual PPC zone of expertise. All this is to improve profits, future-proof your business, and turn any little-brand-that-could into a household name. With more subscribers we'll be able to achieve that - It’s a win/win.
With Amazon's relentlessly competitive advertising environment comes important questions that business owners ask themselves. One of the biggest is "what are my long-term objectives with deploying ad spend in the marketplace?"
Most sellers' goals include profiting from ads or increasing their keyword rank and overall visibility to beat their competitors. While both options are beneficial, which one should they pick? Is it a false dichotomy and you can do both?
We explore this idea and try to shed light on the difference between spending on ads for profit and for rank or visibility, along with the steps to achieve them individually.
Another great session with Mike of Ad Badger's PPC Den Podcast. In this one, we deep-dive into the new bulk sheet format 2.0 that Amazon gifted us this year in the Advertising Console. We discuss what has been changed and added, what we're most excited about, and what to actually?do?about it. It seems odd to talk about a spreadsheet bulk editing tool on a podcast, but we somehow make it work???
Amazon News
The WSJ has been following this thread for a while and this recent update keeps things interesting. The part about Amazon executives group-editing a series of snarky tweets that ended up being disastrous is absolute gold. Other interesting tidbits include Bezos using Signal (a robustly encrypted message app) to discuss sensitive anti-trust matters and Amazon refusing to release the "legally privileged" audit they worked with an external law firm to create which examined their internal practices as they relate to private-label seller’s data. Apparently, this freed them from blame but they still are unwilling to make it public. That paired with Bezos actively resisting testifying in front of Congress is not a good look.
Here is an?even more recent WSJ piece?on this same topic about ongoing SEC investigations. Things are heating up for Amazon.
This along with voice ads are the next frontiers of what we hope to one day offer to clients through Amazon’s various ad platforms. An ADSP in-store attribution feature linked with Whole Foods checkout already exists which is impressive, but this is an entirely different type of Store. Amazon Fresh stores are wholly Amazon-controlled spaces with dozens of different sensor inputs and therefore they will do as they wish rethinking how digital ad space exists in a physical store.
I’m still not convinced Fresh stores will end up being more than an expensive hobby for Amazon but I appreciate their attempts at innovation in this arena. I plan to "Just Walk Out" of some Fresh locations in London with a few Cadbury Eggs later this year?(if you know, you know)
Bonus watch:?some chaps game an Amazon Fresh store
In diving into various Substacks recently I’ve come across Trung’s which is both informative and hilarious. It’s not really focused on one particular subject, and certainly not Amazon, but his dive into the?historical?aspect of Amazon’s approach to the ad business is illuminating, and how Bezo’s early investment (didn’t know that piece of trivia!) in?Google?may have taught him something and spurred this turn towards advertising. How things have changed and how far we’ve come from the days when the algorithmic rank was king and ads were seen as "inferior".
A rare profile of Dave Limp who for more than 10 years has been the Senior Vice-President of Devices and Services and as the head of the hardware division is in charge of all things Alexa in addition to other gadgets like my personal favorite the Kindle. One nugget from the piece I found shocking was that Amazon currently has more than?10,000 employees?working on Alexa. The sheer scale of Amazon continues to amaze me after all these years.
I'm sharing a neat tool I learned of recently when speaking with Tom Piamenta the owner of the company. It's a simple, automated, 100% compliant review request tool that allows you to customize when you actually ask for the review to find the ideal timing and provides ASIN-level analytics. It also looks good and in order to build their brand, Lonesome Labs is offering it for free.
领英推荐
To be clear this is?not?a sponsored link or affiliate post, I just thought I'd share the tool because it could be useful for any of our US clients, and reviews are not getting any?less?important???
Nerd Zone
This is huge news and cause for some minor celebration. Mansour’s Linkedin post attempts to answer two frustrating questions that have dogged Sellers and Advertisers both for years:
1. Does business report data include or exclude mobile app traffic?
2. Are Sponsored Ad pageviews and sessions data included in the business reports data?
The first question is definitively settled while the second I still don’t feel 100% certain about. I think it's possible that ad traffic is now included, but I’m holding out for columns that show clear, broken-out data on Sponsored Ads pageviews and sessions with further breakouts out by mobile and browser types.
Another point he raises is how this change has altered the?Unit Session Percentage?or what Amazon basically considers conversion rate. This percentage is often considered one of the most important KPIs to track and having it suddenly shift under our feet like this is unsettling. It’s true that this area of Seller Central was in dire need of an update, but having such a major KPI change overnight with some questions still remaining unanswered is an unnerving feeling. If I find out more in my own exploration of this I'll add more to this in future?Bulletins.
Here's an earlier post on a closely related subject:?https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6900073881839710208/
As we expand our testing in client accounts into more Sponsored Display campaigns we are learning all the ins and outs of this ad type. One feature we?like?is the ability to set different Bid Optimization types depending on your campaign's goals. The goals currently available are?Reach,?Page Visits,?or?Conversions. One quirk we?don’t?particularly care for is built into all Bid Optimization types and it's how they treat your bid.
Directly from Amazon’s documentation:
Regardless of your bid optimization selection, if we find an opportunity where your ad is more likely to lead to viewable impressions, page visits, or conversions based on the bid optimization you selected, we may increase your bid for that auction by up to 300%
So Amazon has taken the liberty of adjusting our bids by 300% when they see fit. While we don’t doubt there is some powerful data backing their assessments of what is in their eyes an "opportunity" where an ad is more likely to lead to the desired outcome, we’d like the ability to turn off or decrease the % associated with this feature, which we currently lack.
That's all for this month. Thanks for reading! - Brent
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