The Amazon Strategist Show

How to Optimize Your Amazon Ads for Maximum Impact

• The Amazon Strategist Show • Season 3 • Episode 67

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Join John Cavendish for a new episode of The Amazon Strategist Show as he welcomes Andy Craig, founder of AdHabit, a PPC and Amazon account management agency.

Andy shares his journey from being an army veteran and electrician to becoming an Amazon seller and PPC expert.

The discussion delves deep into the nuances of Amazon PPC strategies, the importance of optimizing product listings before launching ads, and how to effectively manage and optimize ad spend to improve product rankings and sales.

Andy also provides his expert opinion on using AI tools for PPC management and offers a controversial take on current practices in the industry.

Tune in for an in-depth discussion packed with actionable advice and expert insights to elevate your Amazon selling strategy.
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Connect with Andy and AdHabit
Website: https://ad-habit.com/
Email: andy@ad-habit.com
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Speaker 1:

If you're going to use these AI algorithm stuff, I think in the future they're going to work really well. I think right now it's best to have a little bit more control for you to set how you want to optimize things.

Speaker 2:

Hello, I'm your host, jon Cavendish, and welcome to season three of the Amazon Strategy Show. That's all strategy, with no hacks, no silver bullets, no magic pills just real, practical strategies for your Amazon business. Today, I'm joined by none other than Andy Craig. Andy started selling on Amazon in 2020 and quickly developed a passion for PPC side of the business. He began by managing ads for his own products and then, when being approached by friends, eventually built a team as demand grew and in 2022, adhabit, his agency, was born. Adhabit offers a variety of services, including PPC management, full account management, listing optimization and many more, so we're going to be chatting really into the PPC today. I think so. Andy, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for having me, John. It's great to be here. Great intro that covers the story.

Speaker 2:

The story. Okay, tell us a little bit more about your story. Add some flesh to the two, okay so I'll add some flesh.

Speaker 1:

I was born on a sunny day, no, I'm just kidding. So you know, in my adult life I started off. You know I was in the army for eight years and then became an electrician. After that Just always wanted to do my own thing.

Speaker 1:

Amazon seemed like an easy way into entrepreneurship. Amazon seemed like an easy way into entrepreneurship so I started there, sourced my own products, started selling them, really fell in love with the PPC side of the business. I spent a ton of my time just learning the ins and outs of that and got pretty good at it to toot my own horn and started getting feelers from friends of mine because I was doing well with my products. They wanted me to help them run theirs. So I started just doing it for friends for free, turned into paid partnerships with different acquaintances and then I've seen a good demand for it. Loved doing it. Still love doing it. Adhabit was born and it's been really great so far. I mean I'm able to work from home, spend more time with my kids and help brands grow. That's one of my favorite things is just working with people to help their businesses grow while making a living for myself. It's a very rewarding space to be in.

Speaker 2:

I love it. That's super cool. And why did you go into advertising? Why PPC? Out of the plethora of things available, why did you start focusing on PPC?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I went to school for electrical engineering. I just always liked numbers, so it just, you know it fit with me. I started doing it. I like doing it. I like the challenge of it and the number is just like. It's just data, right, look at the data, make decisions and then optimize the listing, do all that stuff. And it's challenging to where it's like, all right, we're jumping into this market, right, it's a challenge. We need to run the ads, we need to grow the sales, we need to hit these certain numbers and goals. Just, really, I like it. It's easy. I don't like dealing with people as much, but numbers I like to work with.

Speaker 2:

Love it A beautiful mind. Yeah, love it A beautiful mind. So you touched on something. Then you said optimize the listing. So when you're thinking about ads and PPC, like, what kind of order do you look at things? When you're looking at a new account?

Speaker 1:

Well, I did just speak with a new, you know potential client a couple of days ago and I'm like, hey, before we start PPC at all, we need to optimize this listing. I don't want to spend a bunch of money, throw ads at it if we're going to have a low conversion rate. So I set them up with a photographer that I work with to get the photos done. We'll optimize all the infographics, a plus content, all that. Once that's done, then we'll get started with ads. Because it's a competitive market nowadays. You need to have a really good listing, especially in competitive niches, to get the right amount of sales coming in, get the good conversion rate in order to rank your products. I think that's usually where we do start. Whether the client wants to do it themselves or whether we help them do it or recommend somebody. You have to have a really good listing in most niches nowadays.

Speaker 2:

That's great and yeah, I mean I totally agree there. I think a lot of some agencies don't focus on that enough because you know it's an easy win You're doing ads, but if you double their conversion rate, you half your ROAS on the ads which is amazing, and you look like a phenomenal ads manager, even if you did nothing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we just did a full listing optimization for A to Z the other day for a client and they're like, hey, we're performing really good. Has search volume gone up? What's going on? I'm like, no, it's just conversion rates all across the board, Organic PPC. Everything has gone up, resulting in more sales and profits. So they're pretty happy with it.

Speaker 2:

I love it. And then, when you're looking at listings, before you go into ads, what are the things that you see most people could improve?

Speaker 1:

Usually the images images for sure. I see a lot of brands that just have like they'll have good photos sometimes but no infographics, no branding at all and they're really not hitting on the features and benefits of the product. I spoke with one new account that we started with yesterday and his images were good but he really just went over the technical aspects of it, not any of the reasons why the customer is actually there to buy it. He had a lot of safety features and had a lot of quality features that you know this product is used for, and he didn't hit on any of them. So I think just you know, hitting on those benefits and features, having good branding from you know image one all the way to the A plus content and brand story, makes a big difference. And then we also checked his indexing. There was a lot of keywords that he just wasn't indexing for just because his SEO wasn't fully optimized.

Speaker 2:

Cool, that's interesting. And then for indexing, like, do you use any specific tools for that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we use Helium 10. I've always been a big fan of their tools. They have so many tools built in that one software. That's what we check for indexing, for ranking for keyword research, all that.

Speaker 2:

Cool, nice. So you've done that, you've been to a listing, had it optimized. What do you start looking at next?

Speaker 1:

Then we just start with the keyword research process. You know, whether we did the SEO or not, we'll pull in the SEO research, do more keyword research to figure out a launch strategy. Whether it's an existing brand or not. We do a full keyword research to make sure nothing is being missed. We're going after the right keywords and then we'll start the launch process right, making sure we're hitting on all those super relevant keywords that really pertain to their product before we go to like super broad and category style ones. We want to maximize our ad spend and rankings on their main keywords first. So we'll start to launch those. We tend to not throw a ton of keywords in a campaign. We like to be very separated and have as much control as possible. So we'll even do some single keyword campaigns to where one campaign, one ad group their main keyword. That way we can control the bids, the budgets, the placement modifiers and really take their main sales driver and be able to tweak it in every which way.

Speaker 2:

Cool. And then when you're looking at single keyword campaigns, they tend to be like ranking campaigns or just campaigns to be able to control that major keyword.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes you know both. I think it's good to be able to control that major keyword, especially on a budget standpoint. Right, we want to give that keyword as much budget as possible, to where you know, if we had 100 keywords in a campaign we wouldn't really be able to control that, but it is great for ranking. That way we could take that push top of search, get high top of search impression share and just be there anytime someone types in that keyword.

Speaker 1:

So you're a big believer in ads for ranking as well, yep, I definitely think a lot of things factor into ranking. I mean, I actually just did another podcast with Sumner Hobart yesterday where we spoke about this and you know he does a lot with external traffic, which you know I just do PPC. But you know, using the influencers and Google ads and all this stuff, any extra traffic and sales velocity that you could drive to the listing is going to help you to improve that organic ranking.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'd agree on that. And then, yeah, ars, you've got Tacos behind you. So then do you focus on Tacos or ACOS, and how do you sell that? Well, how do you communicate that with your client, I suppose?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So when we're running ads we always have to optimize for ACOS, right. We don't have a Tacos number on individual search terms, but we always want to keep an eye on tacos. One of the first things we do with any client we start to work with is we set up a call on day one. We set goals, right. We want to have ACOS goals, spend goals, tacos goals, conversion rate goals, and then we want to always keep an eye on tacos, always lower it over time until we hit that happy median that the client's happy with.

Speaker 1:

But at the end of the day, tacos is what really matters. For those of you that are listening, it's total advertising cost of sale, so it's your ad spend divided by total sales and that if you have a 30% profit margin on your product 10% tacos that means you're walking home with 20% at the end of the day in profit to your pocket, outside of any other fees in your business. But tacos is really the bottom dollar most important thing. And sometimes you know our client will come to me and they'll have an 80% ACOS and they'll be like man, this is terrible. I'm like, yeah, but you have a 5% tacos, so it's really not that bad. You're able to even push a little bit more. Maybe work on the conversion rate through PPC and try to fix that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I guess that would also happen a lot when you have really expensive clicks and even if it's converting relatively well, 80% ACOS would be very, very probable.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's different with every account, from what I see. Every account they're all unique in their own ways. Some people have 80 of sales coming through pbc, some people have 10.

Speaker 2:

I mean and when you see accounts of people that have products that aren't ranking, like what do you? Uh, what do you look at first?

Speaker 1:

well, we look at a lot of those main keywords and if they are like I said before, if if they're spending money on those or if they're just spending money broadly all over the place, getting thousands of clicks on different keywords and really not spending enough time or enough ad spend on those best ones, right, because in order to get the ranking, we need sales velocity. So, whatever way you could drive more sales velocity to that keyword, that's what you got to do and the primary way to do it is through Amazon PPC. So, for ranking, that's what we'll start to do. We'll start to increase the traffic as long as the conversion rate is good. Even if the ACoS goes high, right, if we're converting good, we will see an organic rank increase. So that's what we like to do.

Speaker 1:

And what do you define as good? It's very category specific and price specific. So I have clients that have really expensive products and they're never going to rank at the top of the page, but we can get them to position 10, 15, something like that I would say a good conversion rate for most categories is between like 15 20 percent. Um supplements it's going to be higher. You want to be 20 to 30 percent. Expensive products. You're usually looking at five to ten percent.

Speaker 1:

My, my experience, yeah I mean, yeah, I mean I think a lot of people will be happy with 20 to 30 percent conversion rate on their product yeah, we have some supplements and those are very competitive niches and you know you've got to have a really good listing and get that conversion rate up to rank on those ones.

Speaker 2:

And is it I mean, is it the case in supplements that the top one or two spots take, you know, 80% of the volume as well?

Speaker 1:

It's definitely different with different niches, depending on how competitive they are. I do think people will shop around a little bit with supplements because it's something they ingest. So we always go into the brand analytics to where we can see those top click products and we can see that conversion share and the keywords. So we could tell, like, okay, how much is happening in those top three click products? Is 80% of the sales going to it? Is there room in this one? And we'll take that into account when we want to rank too. We'll say, okay, this seems like an open keyword where people shop around a little bit. Let's push harder here, cool.

Speaker 2:

And is there anything else that people should be thinking about when approaching their PPC?

Speaker 1:

What else should they be thinking about? I would say they should definitely think about the long-term strategy. Right? If you are trying to rank, you know you're going to have to push. Your ACOS will probably go up in the short term. Tacos will even go up in the search term. Until you get that sales velocity working, everything's working. You're converting well and then you'll start to see tacos drop. But you do have to give it some time. It's not going to happen over a day, so you need to give it maybe a month or two of a little bit higher cost, a little bit higher tacos, in order to see those results.

Speaker 2:

Cool, love, it All right. So thank you for answering those questions. I mean, it definitely piqued my interest. And yeah, I love diving deep on this stuff. So we're going to go on to the next part of the podcast where we go into your controversial take. So here we ask for your most debatable slash, controversial opinion related to the Amazon or e-commerce industry. Yeah, do you have any controversial opinions?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I definitely do so for background, like I do free audits for clients, so for potential clients, for anyone that really wants it we go through the account, we do a complete overview of their ads, how things are performing, what we might do differently look at their listings. We already talked about conversion rate. Optimize that listing. That's definitely not controversial. Everyone recommends it. But what I see a lot in these audits that I do is people will kind of just throw their accounts into some of these different AI algorithm type services to where it just takes. It automates the bids and really doesn't tell you much about the backend, how the algorithm works. It just optimizes things.

Speaker 1:

I've seen it work well, but I've also seen it just ruin accounts, just not do well at all. They lose their BSR, they lose the ranking. It has the opposite effect because it's always kind of optimizing. It seems like for the ACOS not looking at the tacos, not looking at that long-term, and it just kind of cuts things too much or pushes things out. Way too many campaigns, way too many targets.

Speaker 1:

So I think my controversial take is if you're going to use these AI algorithm stuff, I think in the future they're going to work really well. I think right now it's best to have a little bit more control for you to set how you want to optimize things and before you use them. I think you should really have a really good understanding of PPC before you just throw it into there so you can measure how it's working, what changes that it's making. So I think, be wary about those tools and have really good knowledge of PPC before using them, because you know your PPC account is important. Campaign history is really important. You know stopping and starting stopping old campaigns to start brand new ones doesn't work very well a lot of the time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's interesting. It's interesting you say like the AI will get good eventually, because it makes me think that if that's the case, will they go the same way as, like, facebook is going and remove and start removing and removing targeting and just saying trust us, give us your money, we will give you sales, you know, incorporating the ai at the platform level because facebook started doing that it's possible.

Speaker 1:

But I I haven't run much facebook ads myself, but I've heard with facebook, like they're going to spend your money, so if you want to spend it, it'll spend. So if you stop a campaign and start a brand new one, it's going to spend the money. It's going to show up, you're going to get impressions. But on Amazon, like if I take like we just onboarded a new client today. We were going over he paused a ton of his old campaigns and the first thing we're going to do is go through those and start to turn them back on because they have a ton of history.

Speaker 1:

So with Amazon PPC, right, if you pause a campaign with tons of history and start up a brand new one, most of the time that brand new one is not going to start out the same way. It's not going to get the same impressions right away. Amazon is going to take time to learn it and it's going to have to prove itself. This existing campaign already has tons of history and, the way we see it, the algorithm prefers that. They're like oh, this one's good, kick it back up right away. It's not going to make you wait. So I definitely think campaign history is a big difference between a Facebook and an Amazon, yeah, also, no one has worse customer service than Facebook.

Speaker 2:

Amazon at least has a bit better customer support, and if you don't like them, you can come work with Seller Candy. But yeah, facebook has the worst. Anything goes wrong. So if people are interested in getting in contact with you, andy, how do they do that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, facebook, twitter, youtube. There's Andy Craig. You can just type in Andy Craig, amazon, on YouTube, most platforms on the Andy Craig on Instagram and all that. You could find us at ad-habitcom or go to ad-habitcom forward slash audit. If you want that free audit, or just go to the site it's right there. Book a call and we'll see how we could coach you through everything and help you to do it yourself or take it on for you, so you don't have to deal with it at all yeah, love it.

Speaker 2:

I like those options as well, like done with you or done for you. So, yeah, that's really cool.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I you know I seller and there was a time where I was struggling, right. I didn't know what I was and I did book calls with experts and it really helped me a ton. So I just want to give back and help as many people as I can.

Speaker 2:

Love it. That's amazing. So thank you so much for being here, andy, and yeah, do go and check out adhabit at ad-habitcom and thank you for sharing your insights into PPC.

Speaker 1:

I was just going to say, for anyone that wants to see it, there's probably going to be a podcast that airs on my channel with John, and I think we're going to cover what you do when you get your listing taken down right, how to reactivate it, kind of things.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that'll be great. So yeah, thank you so much. Check out the other video on Andy's channel Andy Craig C-R-A-I-G. I would pronounce that, Craig, in British English.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, craig Craig.

Speaker 2:

You know my people are from Scotland. Yeah, I get it All right, so thanks for being here. If you are listening to this, please go to Spotify, apple, wherever you're listening to us, and rate us. Just click on the star rating. It promotes us way up the rankings, so please do that. If you're watching on YouTube, hopefully not because the video quality today sucks because I am moving house, so hopefully not there. And yeah, thank you for being here, andy.

Speaker 1:

Yep, thanks for having me. I'll see you later.

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