Lazar: (00:00)
Hey guys, welcome to the Wild PPC Bunch podcast. My name is Lazar and I’m a PPC nerd. I have over 10 years of experience in online advertising. And currently I’m the owner of the growing Amazon advertising agency called Sellers Alley.

Brent: (00:14)
And I’m Brent, the owner of AMZ Pathfinder. I started this company five years ago and we’ve been working in online advertising since 2013.

Lazar: (00:21)
Every week we will spend around 30 minutes covering one topic and it will get nerdy, I promise. We’ll prepare a topic, covering everything from PPC basics, in-depth strategy and current trends.

Brent: (00:32)
One thing’s for sure you won’t be bored and you will hear insights, tactics, and ideas straight from two experienced agency owners. So strap in for the ride and enjoy.

Lazar: (00:50)
Hey guys, today we have one interesting topic. We’re going to talk about ad placements. I know that everybody’s concerned about where to show up, what’s the best placement and what they should do. And if your competitors are showing above your ad or your position, how to change that. And we’re going to cover a lot of different stuff, including strategies, we’re going to cover different positions and whole bunch of different stuff, basically.

Brent: (01:21)
Yeah. And then follow up with what issues we get from Amazon. You know, where their data is lacking because as usual, that’s a complaint of ours. Uh, but we’ll, we’ll dive into the topic.

Lazar: (01:33)
Yeah, definitely. This one is a bit challenging. Brent and me talked about that and it’s a bit challenging to have podcasts about ad positions and ad placement. So we’re going to try to describe as many as possible. And in one of the previous podcasts, we mentioned placements. I think we talked about strategies and what’s the best strategy.

Brent: (01:54)
Yeah. But this time we’ll dive deeper. So, can I get started with just the general idea of placements? Like what it means?

Lazar: (02:00)
Of course, of course.

Brent: (02:02)
So basically it’s like, where does your ad, you know, physically, even though it’s digital, of course show up on tablet, mobile, desktop? And, uh, you know, Sponsored Products is the one that has the most ad inventory and the biggest reach. So Amazon actually has a resource on one of their help pages that shows exactly where they show up. So everyone’s familiar with like searching on desktop and probably mobile for Amazon. You see the ads at the top? Um, I believe there are three there now. Lazar is that right? There used to be just two. I sometimes see four, maybe..On some search results..

Lazar: (02:34)
I think it’s, it depends from niche to the niche, like three or four and like..

Brent: (02:40)
And this is the one that clients always ask about too. Like I’m not on the top four, top three, you know, that has the highest visibility for Sponsored Products.

Lazar: (02:46)
Yeah. And Amazon is always checking and testing what are the other options to have. They are testing not only ad positions, but positions to show products. Like we mentioned last time, the position on the right side that is displaying all of the products that are in the shopping cart.

Brent: (03:05)
Yeah, that’s new for sure. I just noticed that myself shopping on Amazon France. So yeah, of course we had those top three. We have middle of search and then bottom of search. So as you scroll through and you’re on desktop, you’re going to see those Sponsored Products all over the place. Um, and then, uh, you know, if you’re on a detail page itself, you’ll see them below the buy box and the main like hero area of the page. And that was actually the ad slot that I think they removed for a little bit during COVID times when they were kind of discouraging people from buying because they already had too many problems with overwhelm as a company. And I remember we saw the impressions for April, May, March, April, May in particular drop a lot and click through rate go up, um, strangely. Because, uh, those ad positions were removed temporarily.

Lazar: (03:53)
Yeah. So basically at this point for let’s say.. By the way, since you mentioned Q4 and problems with COVID and everything,we should have one episodes discussing about Q4 and like what to expect there, because honestly I feel that Amazon is getting itself into huge trouble because I’m pretty sure that they’re not going to be able to fulfill everything. They’re not going to have enough resources to go through Q4. So it’s going to be super challenging for them.

Brent: (04:28)
Yeah. It sounds like you read the same article from Casey Gauss on his, uh, his digital shelf labs, a blog that he’s got going now, but I agree. I’m inclined to agree with what he has written there.

Lazar: (04:37)
Oh yeah, definitely. Uh, I know that Casey mentioned it and to be honest, I talked with some guys from Amazon. Like, I think that they’re not like super comfortable with current situation.

Brent: (04:52)
All right. Let’s, let’s say that for an episode closer to quarter four. What do you think?

Lazar: (04:56)
Yeah, definitely. So let’s move back to ad placements. Are we going to talk about what are the positions or which campaign types are going to show on, on certain positions or so on? Like, we didn’t really go through this. So basically when you mentioned that you can see on Amazon, that you can see what are the ad placements for Sponsored Product ads, what is funny is that you cannot do the same thing for Sponsored Brand ads. And Sponsored Brand ads are expanding more and more and you are now having videos, you’re having images, you’re having literally two new sets of ads. So basically I think we should start with having campaigns that are there to provide placements on Amazon and others that are off Amazon. I know that you’re working super hard on DSP and DSP shows the ads outside of Amazon. Can you tell a bit more?

Brent: (05:59)
Right? So you have O&O which is owned and operated. So ads that are going to show up on Amazon and Amazon owned properties. Amazon owns a bunch of websites, not just IMDB, but like a bunch of others. And so those do have some like native ad types, and those are different sizes and shapes. And then you have some appearing on Kindle devices and stuff like that. But for the most part, DSP has what’s called IAB ad types. So they’re like pretty standard ad types that are determined by the international advertisers bureau or whatever that organization is called. So they’re like, you know, 320 by 50 pixels and this kind of thing. And they’ll show up on all those standard kind of templated areas on what’s called open exchange websites, like off Amazon. So those are pretty normal. The one thing that is there’s different with DSP, that’s not widely known, but they do have a couple of creative types. Um, one of which is newer called a responsive e-commerce creative. And that actually has some added inventory that is unique to DSP inside of Amazon’s ecosystem. Actually took a screenshot of an email I got recently from someone at DSP and it says: this ad type opens up access to product detail, page desktop hero promo 650 by 130 pixels desktop detail, right and mobile hero quick promo. Both of which are also fairly small pixel counts, but you know, ad inventory is one of these constantly evolving things with DSP. I think that’s true for a Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, which by the way, shares a lot of ad inventory with DSP. The two are alike, cousins basically.

Lazar: (07:35)
Yeah, definitely. And like for DSP, you can say if you’re not from Amazon world, you can consider DSP to be something like programmatic retargeting or programmatic media buying outside of one platform. So it’s something that can be challenging for sellers, because they’re used to one way of like advertising and promoting their products and people on different platforms are going to have different ideas of why they’re on that website and so on. So let’s move back to Amazon basically and to see what are the options. When you come to Amazon and when you search something, there’s obviously top of the search. That’s one of the ad options. It’s usually as, as we mentioned, three or four positions on the top. And one of the first questions that I got.. I’m pretty sure that everybody knows positions more or less and they can find it on Amazon. But I think we should mention some, some stuff like: if I have two products and if I have one keyword, are they both going to show up on the top of a search? Do you have any idea about that?

Brent: (08:51)
That’s a good one, isn’t it? It’s a great question. Um, and that’s a really good thing for someone to ask the client, who’s thinking logically about how their appearance looks on the website. Um, I mean, it’s my understanding that no, you’re not going to have two products from, you know, show up on the same search. Uh, I mean, there’s a chance of that if those keywords and those products are in different campaigns, right. Not in the same campaign. Um, I think time was that you could, you could do that. I could be wrong about this. I’m not actually a hundred percent sure. But, uh, really it has to come down to Amazon’s assessment of relevance and likelihood of a purchase. So does Amazon think that both of your offers are so good that they’re willing to put both of your ads in those top ad slots for the same keyword? I think in most cases, the answer is no. There’s a lot of other competitors out there gunning for the same spot who are bidding just as high, if not higher than you. You know, it’s an a second based, uh, bid bid auction model. So yeah, it’s possible that people are gonna outbid you. Um, I don’t know. What, what do you think about this?

Lazar: (09:56)
I think completely the same thing. I remember the time when I was advertising one product and like color variations and I would place color variations in different campaigns and they would show up. Like, I could see black and orange and blue one. And I would place for the first one, for the best seller, I would place the highest bid and for the rest of them, I would place lower bids. Over the time I would increase that bid until I remove everybody else from top of the search. Uh, but as you mentioned, I’m pretty sure it’s not working anymore that way and how it’s working. I have no idea. That’s the honest answer. And that’s something that’s up to Amazon. Like you can always try, you can always combine, um, different campaigns and hope that you’re going to show up there or to have one exact form or to have one broad or phrase keywords for one product and the other one for the other one. So yeah, it’s a shady turf. Like I cannot promise tha kind of setup is going to work. It’s something that everybody should double check on their own.

Brent: (11:16)
Yeah, even pay attention to the search term duplication and how you have your keywords arranged in your account. Um, you’re probably gonna have duplicated keywords showing up here and there for, uh, for terms. So even when that happens, I can’t say that we often notice two products from the same advertisers showing up. Um, one problem we have or not problem, I guess one thing we’ve run into with some clients is like, there’ll be two different accounts that they have. Cause maybe they have a reseller who is like a licensed reseller and we’ve gone in and manage their advertising too. So we’re actually bidding from two totally distinct separate accounts for some the same ad slots and, you know, trying to balance the spend and budgets between those two accounts and that case. Yeah. You’ll definitely have two ads show up, um, for like different products. Cause there’s two different accounts that are bidding for it, even if it’s on the same keyword. So that can happen for sure. But that’s a more rare circumstance and, you know, sellers need to be aware of that if they have separate accounts, but not always common.

Lazar: (12:16)
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So basically you’re on the search result page and you, you finished with top of the search, we’re going to talk about strategies should you be on the top of the search or not? So the other placement that you can, you can show your ads is middle of the search. So basically, and I’m pretty sure… I’m not really sure about you Brent, for some niches I saw more than one middle placement, like four ads, but after a couple of rows they would show up once more. It would show up twice that way, like upper middle…

Brent: (12:59)
Yeah, I’ve seen that too when the scroll is long enough. Yeah. You’ll get two, I don’t know, trenches of ads. Like second and the third and then the bottom ones. Like we talked about as the bottom echelon.

Lazar: (13:11)
Yeah. And as you mentioned, the last place is the bottom of the search result page.

Brent: (13:20)
Right. And I think, um, you know, when it comes to bidding, you’re going to be ranked based on of course relevance, your bid, CTR rate, all these different metrics that Amazon has in mind. Um, but I’m not sure, like at the bottom of the page is that much cheaper than the top. I would love to see an actual set of data on the spread of costs between those. But since we have so little from Amazon, um, based on you know, information by placement, by exact placement, cause it’s not very fine tuned. Uh, we can’t know. I’m sure that like places one, two and three are costly, right. But is three really much more costly than like 12, like which might be at the very bottom of the page? I don’t know. I really don’t know. And that’s where a lot of impressions probably are incurred, but of course your click through rate drops off a lot towards the bottom.

Lazar: (14:11)
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And like the last position there that you can have on search result page, you have three positions there that are basically logos of the products and those are Sponsored Brand ads and those are basically not a Sponsored Product ads but they’re more Sponsored Brand Ads. And for Sponsored Brand Ads one of the positions that I saw that is super interesting is the one next to filter button.

Brent: (14:44)
Oh, on that left side. Yeah. I was trying to think a minute ago of all different places I’ve seen Sponsored Brands and certainly top of search is the one that everyone knows and loves. But that left side one, the one that’s kinda like halfway down a product detail page. That’s another one. Um, and now with these custom images, we have these like big, beautiful, like a Sponsored Brands that show up in the search results, like in the middle. Um, especially on mobile. I feel like I see it way more on mobile than I do on desktop.

Lazar: (15:16)
Yeah, definitely. Those are really good. I didn’t know what what’s your experience with them, but like when it comes to us, I can definitely tell you that people are clicking on them just because they’re, they can upscale. Uh, they make, they can make your brand more premium if you have some nice visuals and nice pictures. And like you stand out with those pictures, with those ads, basically.

Brent: (15:41)
I think that those custom images are some of like the 80/20 for grabbing more real estate and attention on Amazon. Because if you do have premium imagery, it’s so much easier to do than video, right. Video can be quite costly to produce. But if you just have a couple of nice images that are lifestyle for like a workout product or something, that’s going to make a huge difference. So yeah, I highly recommend everyone try that. Easier to iterate on the video, for sure.

Lazar: (16:04)
So basically we covered search result page. Do you want to go to product listing page? Like I’m not really sure that Amazon even mentioned that part. Like when you go to, um their website to see like, what are the options?

Brent: (16:21)
Yeah, we were looking at some of the documentation ahead of this call and it’s not really well laid out. It just says, yeah, there’s some Sponsored Products that show up below the Buy Box and below the product. And they’re halfway down the page. You know, we all know that a lot of those come from auto campaigns. Um, well help me with this other one Lazar. I remember back in the day below the Buy Box itself, like directly below it, there was product display right. Now that’s called Sponsored Display on the far right. Yeah. And to my knowledge, that is still a Sponsored Display, but I know DSP also shows up there too, but I don’t think Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Products does.

Lazar: (16:56)
I think it’s still displayed, but when you move to the left, next to it, uh, it was usually auto campaign.

Brent: (17:06)
Right.

Lazar: (17:06)
Like that’s, that’s the one that I saw pretty frequently. Like when it comes to automatic campaigns, they can show up literally everywhere.

Brent: (17:12)
Right, that was on the carousel.

Lazar: (17:14)
Yeah. That’s one of the reasons, what we mentioned previous time that you should never stop with automatic campaigns, just because there are so many options and so many places where your ads can show up that you would definitely want to have one campaign that can show up there. At least occasionally.

Brent: (17:33)
Yeah. That’s another good reason not to stop the auto. And like I mentioned, with that DSP special placement. Um, well, this is a good example, you know, during a prime…Sorry, uh, deal, lightning deal. Um, you’ll have the, uh, if you have an auto campaign active, you’ll get more exposure on the auto campaign during that deal, that lightning deal. They’ll start to show the ad in more places. And that gives us that strange thing in the search term data. Um, I’m blacking on her right now. What’s it called? You can see it like a deal of the day or something like that. It’s like your actual search term. But what that means is just that you had an auto campaign running during a lightning deal. That’s all it means. Um, and usually you get like a crap, ton of impressions, right? And the metrics are, aren’t always the best, but it is a brief period of time where it runs like five, six hours or whatever.

Lazar: (18:20)
Yeah. Return on the spend for those are really, really bad. Like you should even consider pausing or slowing down those campaigns while you run lightning deals.

Brent: (18:30)
Yeah. That could be one outcome. Well, let’s talk about mobile a little bit before I maybe segue into the next one. Um, because we’re looking at this, this document, this document here that has some information on the placements. And I think the one thing to notice for mobile is that when you’re on mobile web, you know, not the app, you just have ads that appear on the very bottom, the last rows, but when you’re on the app, you have ads that appear at the top, there’s two usually. Or sometimes I’ve seen Sponsored Brands, especially with those custom images, taking up a huge amount of real estate, like half the screen. And then at the bottom you have two more slots. So the slots are more limited on mobile, but that’s of course, because the visibility is way more limited, you know. I think mobile, uh, it just takes up so much more space. Like ads are probably more effective on mobile. Unfortunately we still don’t have data for that from Amazon. Like we can’t see desktop versus tablet versus mobile.

Lazar: (19:20)
Yeah. It would be really awesome to have an option to bid on certain device. Like I want to have this campaign just for mobile app or just for…Yeah, that’s going to be awesome. That’s something that, uh, Google Ads had like ages ago..

Brent: (19:35)
Yeah, 8 years ago. Something like that.

Lazar: (19:39)
Yeah. And when it comes to Sponsored Brand Ads on mobile browser, they changed the size of it recently. So they make way more sense now. Because previously you would just see the logo of the seller. And one of the best things that you could do while you could, is to place the product instead of logo. But today you need to place the logo, but since they changed the format, you see the logo and you can see the first product. And you can realize if you’re using your phone, you can scroll. You have the idea that you should scroll because previously you would just see logo and you wouldn’t like even think if you should use your hand and like swift it to the left.

Brent: (20:31)
Right. I think that’s a, that’s a good user behavior. They’ve kind of like been able to communicate with that ad type and you can see the product in a lot of circumstances. But if you use that Store spotlight feature, I think we talked about in our last episode, you can also put in a whole link to a sub page. So it’s not even just like one product. It takes that person directly to a sub page and their Amazon store. Um, so that’s like another way to do that. Uh, but I don’t see that in use very often. I think a lot of people don’t use that ad type anyway, but the placement is the same. Your point stands.

Lazar: (21:04)
Yeah. Like I know that Amazon is up to a lot of stuff in the near future. We have an office in Belgrade Serbia and I know that a couple of companies in Serbia are currently working on AI for Amazon just to make sure that user experience is even better. And I know that many people mentioned recently that Alexa is communicating with them regarding like you bought something previously and like, would you like to leave a review. Or you bought something that you should buy once again after a certain period of time. And Alexa asks you if you want to purchase it once again. And what’s interesting…And I’m pretty sure that, I think you talked about that previously in one of our conversations, about the audio ads. And that’s something that is going to be super interesting in the relatively near future. But with everything going around Amazon, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be super crazy.

Brent: (22:11)
Yeah. I guess that’s a totally uncharted territory for us. I mean, I’m sure that there are brands that are running audio ads in Beta right now, but they’re not none of our clients, uh, you know, I think you have to have the right connection or something to do that. But yeah, I mean, one day maybe we’ll talk about audio ads placement on this podcast. Um, maybe we’ll have an Alexa ad in the middle.

Lazar: (22:31)
Yeah. Who knows?

Brent: (22:33)
So, Hey, do you want to take us into the territory of, uh, you know, actual tactics here? Cause you you’ve made some really good points in this document. Um, and I wanna kick off on the right foot. So, uh, take us into that.

Lazar: (22:44)
Yeah, definitely or this episode is going to last for two hours.

Brent: (22:49)
Watch the time, maybe 35 minutes.

Lazar: (22:52)
Yeah. So basically what’s important there is you have so many bidding options and you have so little information about your ad placements. So it’s more or less shooting in the dark, but still you have three options that you can see in the reports. You can see like the best one called the rest of the page that you cannot optimize to. You have the top of the search and you have product listing page and that’s it. So basically, Amazon is giving you information what are the three options about where the ads can show up? And one of the super interesting things that Brent mentioned before this podcast about ASIN targeting. Maybe you would like to take more credit for it, can you tell us in one, two sentences what’s it about, where your ads show up when you have ASIN targeting?

Brent: (23:49)
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I think this is probably common knowledge at this point, but like a lot of clients we engage with, they sometimes don’t know this. But people think that ASIN targeting means that it only shows up on that ASINs page. So if you’re browsing, you’ll see it in that kind of mid page carousel, we talked about just 10 minutes ago. But in fact, when you do ASIN targeting, what you’re essentially doing is following that ASIN anywhere on Amazon. So if it shows up in a search for granola bars and you’re targeting that ASIN you will also be following that product and have your ads show up if you’re bidding appropriately and everything. Um, so yeah, common misconception, but yeah, that’s just something to, to realize when you do it. The reason you can tell not only does Amazon have it in their documentation, but when you look at the results from your product attribute, targeting, you know, ASIN targeting campaigns, you see data for top of search and rest of search. It’s not only just product page. However, it might make sense to really boost that on the product pages in particular. Um, and that’s where the tactics that we have here is like put your percentage up for product pages when you’re doing ASIN targeting. So you really are targeting more precisely, as best you can with Amazon, um, you know, to show up on that competitors page.

Lazar: (25:00)
Yeah. And basically when it comes to product pages placements, they’re more focused with ASIN and category targeting.

Brent: (25:08)
Yeah. I would agree with that. Whereas top of search is, uh, you know, primarily what people… About people, I mean, clients and people like us consultants talk about and focus on, because if you do have that big keyword , that big, hairy keyword that you want to chase, you can do the bid increase by top of search and typically break it out into a new campaign, right? So you have the data at the campaign level only, and that makes interpreting it a lot easier, but still, like you said, we’re given a very crude tool. You know, we don’t have placements one, two, three, four, we just have top of search, product page, rest of search. And rest of search is like a catch all. It’s like everything. Just toss it all in there. Uh, we don’t know exactly what…

Lazar: (25:48)
It’s literally automatic campaign.

Brent: (25:51)
Yeah, it’s a lot of stuff.

Lazar: (25:52)
And what you mentioned about that main keyword that you want to focus on, that’s something that we usually do when it comes to product launches. We do a lot of push campaigns and push campaigns or campaigns with up to five, six keywords in exact form. Um, usually having some, some bidding optimization for top of the search and they’re separated from the rest just to be sure that we track, uh, the spend and performance. And usually they’re not having super good performance at the beginning just because there is no traction. Just because Amazon, even though they’re giving you extra love, because you just started the advertising and selling the product and you’re in that honeymoon period, you still need to get some traction until you reach to the point when you have like optimal amount of sales on a daily basis. And on the other hand, like there is another option when it comes to manual campaigns.. Uh, to have extremely low bids and the placement of 900%. That’s something that is super tricky and if you don’t know how to do it, you’re probably going to end up spending way more than you planned. So if you want to do it, you need to definitely decrease your initial bid a lot and increase your placement bids a bit more. What we usually suggest people is to play around, do placement report, check where your sales are coming from, check what’s your ACoS at which placement. Maybe if you’re having two or three more sales from top of the search comparing to other placements and your ACoS is three times higher than for the rest of the search or on the product placement. Maybe your ads shouldn’t show up on top of the search all of the time, because it’s not that profitable for you. And I remember one of the things that we did in the past.. Like when it comes to Google ads, Google ads had some really great features that they removed to be honest, just to make people spend more money..You would be able to target for a specific ad position, like to target I want to show up on the top of the search, but I want to show up between, like in average, between second and third position, and that’s something that you don’t have anymore. And that’s something that really looks like Amazon now, because on Amazon, you cannot really target specific position, like position number one, two or three on the top of the search. And sometimes being the first doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to have the most sales. Just because like, uh, sometimes it’s super expensive in competitive niches or like supplements or something where like.. I’m pretty sure that you, Brent and your team saw bid suggestions as well for some supplements, for some keywords. It’s insane. Like it’s even more expensive..

Brent: (29:02)
Yeah it’s not realistic. Because people who are getting involved in those auctions. I mean, I’m sure some of them know their numbers really well, but others perhaps don’t, and they’re just throwing money to try to fix the problem. They’re just throwing money at it. Or they have really, really deep pockets and they can afford to spend into the ground for a couple months. Um, and then eventually have some traction. Right. But yeah, I mean, if you want to compete with those people, if you have the pockets, if you’re, you know, that daring go for it. But like overall, position three or the middle of the page might be better at meeting your actual ROAS goals or ACoS goals, either one, cause Amazon has added ROAS now. Um, but either one, it might be better doing that. And as you had written in the document, it’s like the click through rate is going to be awesome at the top, the cost is going to be really high. But if your conversion rate is not following up, not only are you going to pay for it in terms of ROI, but also Amazon might take you out of that spot eventually because they can tell what your conversion rate is. So the people that stay there and eventually will get cheaper cost per clicks are the ones that have the conversion rate to back it up. So you can’t just necessarily throw money at the problem but you could certainly try. Um, but yeah, there’s a couple of nuances there. The top of the page is not always the best. I think that’s maybe the core lesson to take away.

Lazar: (30:18)
Definitely. Definitely. Even though Amazon is making money by having people clicking on your ads, they also want to get some money from the fees, you know. Like from the selling fees, especially if it’s FBA. And it’s like nothing personal, it’s a normal thing. I wouldn’t expect to have it in any other way, rather than that. So like, it’s a rental place and if you’re not providing, you’re probably not suitable to be there. It’s not Amazon’s fault, to be honest. Yeah. So…

Brent: (30:53)
I want to go back to the thing you mentioned the 900%, I feel like it was a little bit irresponsible to Amazon to introduce a feature that allowed people to bid it up by that much. And then there was a lot of talk that went around at the time that was released, I guess it was some point early last year if my memory is correct. But you know, people were like yeah, just do this strategy 10 cents and then 900%. Yeah. But like 900% of 10 cents, like still, that’s like a substantial amount of money if you’re going to be bidding it up that much. And so people were losing their shirts, you know, so to speak on it, they were spending tons of money because they wrote a blog post here or there. Um, and I think what we’ve learned is it’s better to have like a moderate bid and then bid it up by, you know, I don’t know, maybe anywhere from 150 to like 400% depending. You know, there’s a couple of different scenarios for that. But we still do tests at 900% here and there, but you have to be really cognizant of what the keyword is, what match type it is, what you’re going to be exposed to, who your competitors are. And then also just do the simple math on like how much would it be at most, if someone were to click this at 900% and that could be pretty eye opening. So, yeah, be careful with that.

Lazar: (31:58)
Yeah, and like, if you double check what’s the average amount of clicks until you get to your sale. And if you calculated, what’s going to be average CPC with this strategy and if you don’t see the math to sell product that way, maybe you shouldn’t do it that way. There are so many different other ways that are better and easier to make more sales. Like one of the things that we usually do when we do audits, we check for each ASIN, what’s the best position for each one of them. And we check the reporting. One of the interesting things that people should definitely is product page placements and they can help you to attack more aggressively your competitors or to protect your listings from your competitors. Basically those are those attacking and defensive campaigns that you should have when it comes to ASIN targeting, to target your own products, just to protect them from your competitors. Basically.

Brent: (33:02)
That’s very interesting Lazar. Let me ask you then. So in our experience, um, cause we do audits of course as well. We don’t do that, but we do look at the bid modification by placement per campaign and assess how the performance is at a campaign level. Doing it at a product level as I think even better and more granular. And like, there’s a great idea. So in your experience, you know, most ASINs do they have better results for rest of search or product page or top of search or is it really, is there any trend there, like their top seller is the one that does the best with top of search? Is there any kind of thing to pull out of that I’m really interested.

Lazar: (33:39)
Best sellers are usually products that are above niche average when it comes to CTR and conversion rates. They are in like top 10%. So they have higher chance to show up on top of the search and perform good. Because Amazon would prefer to have that product there, that somebody is going to click on and after that to purchase it. And like, if you want to push some new product, you’re probably going to spend way more comparing to that best selling product. On the other hand, when it comes to product placements, I can tell you like that 50% of ASINs usually perform better on product page and page placement rather than on top of the search.

Brent: (34:26)
Interesting, that’s why you’re saying target that so aggressively. Cause I’m thinking about our own data. I don’t have it in front of me right now, but I have reviewed it recently. Where we do track with kind of like data aggregation software tied into our ads management platform we use. I think the most overall impressions do occur on product pages. You know, the ones from top of search are a small slice. And then I think rest of search is the second most, but I think product page has the most impressions overall. You know, if you look at an account for a 60 day period, that’s what you’d find.

Lazar: (34:59)
Yeah. Well, I feel like that there is way more to talk about. The strategies and all of that. So..

Brent: (35:07)
Why don’t we wrap with Sponsored Brands? Because I know that’s on our notes here. Um, we’ve talked about because we’ve been talking totally Sponsored Products so far with, with the actual tactics.

Lazar: (35:15)
Yeah, definitely. Do you want to touch base the Sponsored Brand ads?

Brent: (35:21)
Sure. Yeah, correct me if I’m wrong here, but as I understand it, um, you know, having built some of these recently myself, but not doing it every day, day in, day out, that’s really what the team’s doing. Um, you know, you can essentially down bid for placements that are not a top of search with Sponsored Brands. So you’re saying I’m only really interested in getting my ads to the top. And if it’s on that left hand side, like we mentioned, or it’s, uh, halfway down the product detail page, which I think is a new Sponsored Brands like ad slot. Um, yeah. I’m not interested in that. So I’ll bid that down by 200% or I don’t know, is it capped at a hundred? I don’t even know, but the point is you can, you can augment it. So then you’re effectively saying, I only want this ad to show up at the top.

Lazar: (36:03)
Yeah, definitely. To be honest, I was always a huge fan of that left side position for the Sponsored Brand ads. I don’t know why, but I always felt like that people are ignoring it and most of the time campaigns perform super good when it comes to this position next to filter button.

Brent: (36:23)
Yeah. I don’t have any strong feelings on using this. I know people on the team do it and I see them naming the campaigns differently to indicate that. So they say like, Oh, this one has a bid modification to ensure that it’s only top, maybe that works. If you have like a tight grouping of super relevant keywords and you’re going hyper aggressive on it, kind of like how we mentioned using Sponsored Products for launches or pushing rank. Um, although I wouldn’t really recommend that someone use Sponsored Brands for pushing keyword rank. Um, it’s not, it’s not one of the first use cases that would come to mind for me, but it is possible to do that.

Lazar: (36:55)
Yeah. It’s more like brand-awareness and attributed sales for organics. I would more consider them to be something like that rather than to just as push campaigns.

Brent: (37:08)
Yeah, likewise.

Lazar: (37:08)
What we would usually do, like for ages. That’s one of the things that was a first step , when it comes to Sponsored Brand ads with keyword targeting, we would take the best performing keywords from Sponsored Product ads and add them to Sponsored Brand ads.

Brent: (37:26)
And that’s still part of the process.

Lazar: (37:28)
Yup.

Brent: (37:28)
Let’s talk about the data issues. We get, we’ll wrap it up here. Keep it, keep it reasonable length. But you know, we we’ve touched on this like a couple of times in the episode, cause it’s almost unavoidable, right? We have so little actual data from Amazon about placements. Uh, first of all, we can’t bid by mobile tablet, desktop, which I consider placements. Right? This is device placement.

Lazar: (37:48)
Of course.

Brent: (37:48)
We don’t know what position one versus four data is. We just know top of search and then, you know, product page like we’ve talked about. Um, and we don’t have it at the ad group or keywords level, certainly not the keyword level, but we only have it at the campaign level. So when you do these efforts, you should split them out into campaigns ideally, or have a small grouping of keywords because you’re only going to get that data at the campaign level. So these, these three things present like a lot of challenges.

Lazar: (38:15)
Yeah, definitely. One of the things that I love about Google ads, that we don’t have an Amazon, is auction insights to see how often we show our ads, uh, comparing to somebody else. Like how often my ad is displayed above your ad or that kind of the stuff. That would be really, really good to know, and to be able to outbid that way. That would be like direct way. How to burn money to outbid somebody.

Brent: (38:46)
Right. And maybe Amazon doesn’t want to reveal it for some competitive reason or something. And something you mentioned earlier, like where we can say, yeah, we want to be positioned three because we found that that’s the best balance of spend and exposure and ROI. Uh, it’d be great if we could say: Hey, Amazon, I want to be positioned three because I know looking at the data that you’ve now given us that position three is our best return on ad spend for the last 60 days. You know, that’s like a dream feature for us, for sure.

Lazar: (39:15)
Yeah, definitely. That would be awesome. Yeah.

Brent: (39:17)
I can’t think of many other big data issues. Um, but yeah, that’s kind of the state of things right now, uh, in, in summer 2020.

Lazar: (39:25)
Well, these are huge, definitely on like, I wouldn’t like to have any more problems when it comes to reporting. This is just enough.

Brent: (39:33)
Yeah. Hopefully software and API will address these things as they come out, if they do get kind of corrected or augmented.

Lazar: (39:40)
Okay. Yeah, definitely. Okay. So I think we’re done for today’s episode and if you guys want to hear more about ad placements and some strategies, please let us know, because obviously we can talk indefinitely about this. And for the next episode, we are going to have really nice guest. That is a really, really big name when it comes to Amazon PPC and the Amazon world. So follow us and be sure that you’re tracking all of the episodes and you’re listening what we’re saying. And also if you have any questions and if you have any suggestions about what we should talk about, please send us an email on ask@wildppcbunch.com.

Brent: (40:23)
Sure. Q&A would be great. Nice job with the teaser Lazar.

Lazar: (40:30)
Well that’s it for today. Bye guys.

Brent: (40:32)
Farewell.