The Amazon Strategist Show

How to Revamp Your Amazon Listings for Maximum Impact

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Join host John Cavendish and Brent Zahradnik, the founder of AMZ Pathfinder, as they dive deep into the evolving world of Amazon advertising. In this episode, Brent, who manages a team of 22 experts and oversees millions in ad spend, shares his insights on:

Revamping Product Listings: Learn why updating your listings is crucial before expanding your advertising efforts.

Advanced Advertising Techniques: Discover the power of creative ad types and how to effectively use the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).

Budgeting and Campaign Optimization: Get practical tips on budgeting and utilizing new ad formats to enhance brand visibility.

Whether you're just starting out or looking to refine your approach on Amazon, Brent's expert guidance will help you maximize both your advertising impact and organic growth. Tune in for actionable advice tailored to help your brand thrive on Amazon.
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Connect With Brent and AMZ Pathfinder
Website: https://www.amzpathfinder.com/
Email: brent@amzpathfinder.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentzahradnik/
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Connect with John Cavendish
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jgcuk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejohncavendish
LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/thejohncavendish

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Speaker 1:

If your product listing looks the same as it did two and a half to even one year ago, that's probably a bigger thing for you to tackle than going around and seeing what newest Amazon advertising tool or hack or tip. It's probably better to actually go back to your listing and work on those fundamentals rather than putting more time and energy in advertising.

Speaker 2:

Hello, I'm your host, john Cavendish, and welcome to season three of the Amazon Stratus Show. The show that's all strategy, with no hacks, no silver bullets and no magic pills, just real, practical strategies to grow your Amazon business. Today, I am joined by none other again than Brent Zorabnik from AMZ Pathfinder. Brent's been on the show before and he started AMZ Pathfinder back in 2015. So got to be one of the longest running Amazon ad services out there now, and he's worked with hundreds of brands on the Amazon marketplace across North America, europe and Asia. Pathfinder manages millions of dollars in monthly spend and he has a team of 22 advertising experts who speak 11 languages, which is pretty cool. He lives in france with his wife, bear cat and too many bicycles, which I just asked him how many bikes do you have rent?

Speaker 2:

and welcome to the show hi, john, I have five and I'm working on a sixth so do you have to like get sign off from your wife when you do this, or is there?

Speaker 1:

we have a sufficiently large garage now, after moving, that it's no longer a problem is there like a bike budget uh, well, it's like the one thing I spend money on. I'm not much for lambos and jets and uh, business class and stuff like this, so, uh, bikes is pretty much where I spend money on. So there's no, there's no budget, it's just a budget. Is space, how much space we have in the house and what I can tolerate?

Speaker 2:

well, I love it and I guess if you also, if you anchor with your wife to Lambos and private jets, then no bike, no matter how ridiculous, seems expensive in any way.

Speaker 1:

Or crazy cruises or, you know, exotic safari adventures. I've done none of those things, just sticking to bikes, although I would love to do a safari, but that's a whole other subject.

Speaker 2:

Remember me too. Next trip, Next trip. So welcome back to the show. What's new in the Amazon advertising space? So welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1:

What's new in the Amazon advertising space? What's new? That's a big question. I think maybe one of the biggest, most exciting things that's happened just kind of update the audience is, generally speaking, the ability of sponsored display and sponsored brands to get more and more and more types of ad creatives is something that has been really challenging but also really exciting for us at Pathfinder, because for years we kind of were in this space where we had sponsored products and then your ad creative was just whatever your primary image is in your product and that's like fairly boring. But now we have the ability to layer on so many different kinds of creative and that has expanded to vertical video, different kinds of video, different landing pages, so you can send the traffic from those ad types to various places. So if you look at like this option times that option, times this option, when you go in and configure or build these campaigns, you just have so many creative tools available to you.

Speaker 1:

And another thing kind of related to that I'll mention is that when we actually do account audits which we do every week we do one or two a week we so rarely see people actually taking advantage of this full palette of things that they can do. They're not making nearly enough videos. They're not taking vertical videos for other platforms, which Amazon has pretty much explicitly stated. That's why they made it like that. So you can take something from TikTok or Instagram and scrub it of the TikTok logo right, amazon doesn't like that but then put it on their platform and use it. We so rarely see that.

Speaker 1:

Still, most people are just doing keyword advertising and doing the basics, and it's kind of mind blowing to us because there's so much available. So that's maybe like an update for what's new. On a more technical, nerdy side, amazon Marketing Cloud is the other thing that we're super hype about. That is available mostly for companies that are spending a significant budget on Amazon DSP Although, just talking with someone at Amazon earlier this week, there is the ability to use AMC. Coming to everyone is just using sponsored ads. It's kind of rolling out like a beta alpha later this year, so that's really cool. That's a much, much more advanced like business intelligence and analytics tool. Let's call it. That's available for everyone.

Speaker 2:

Nice, Cool. So yeah, Amazon Marketing Cloud I haven't dived into it at all. Can you kind of take us through like a high level of how that works?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, sure. So basically, Amazon likes to define it as what they call like a data clean room. So imagine that all the people that have interacted or touched your ads in some way, you have information on them, and then what you're able to do is not correlate that with a specific person, Like I can't say oh, it was John that clicked on my ad from his iPad last Thursday from Asia, after he saw two other ads that I had. You can like pull that information out of AMC, but they do it in what Amazon calls a privacy-safe environment, so it doesn't personally identify anyone. The data is aggregated, but it allows you to see things like customer journey. So someone has seen display ads of mine three times. Then they've gone to sponsored products and they've clicked on that. Then three days later they went back, they searched, they clicked on a sponsored brands campaign. They added it to their cart in 24 hours later or less. They checked out. So we can actually start to map that out. Yet again, it won't say John did this. It'll say a user did this right.

Speaker 1:

Amazon always makes it very clear in their documentation that it's privacy safe. It's designed to be what they call like a data clean room, but essentially the point of it is not so much reporting and analytics, it's like answering specific business questions like how valuable is it for us to run Amazon DSP? How many people does that get in the top of funnel and build awareness with that we're able to then address with ads later? Or what does the customer journey look like? One good example is, with some of the additional information you can add on to AMC, you can actually target people that have searched for keywords that are relevant to what you're advertising but haven't actually seen your ads. So you know that they're kind of interested in some way, but they haven't really engaged with you yet. Let's build a larger audience to address them. There's many other use cases that kind of tie in with display advertising and DSP, but that's a little bit more advanced. That's a very basic like five cent tour of it. If I had to give, if I had to give it.

Speaker 2:

If you do it for five cents, I'll take a thousand of those. That's awesome, Thank you. Lots of detail and really good. So I mean that's to change the way the agencies look at advertising then, because this almost takes you into kind of like intelligence and funnel and all sorts of other stuff which were completely separate from, yeah, like an amazon advertising agency in the past.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, because you know to go back to an example, you know, pathfinder will be nine years old.

Speaker 1:

Um, tomorrow.

Speaker 1:

We're in the middle of august 2015 and, like one thing, that just because we've been around a long time doesn't mean we're the best, right, but it does mean we have a good perspective on history.

Speaker 1:

So one thing I say that has changed over the years just sponsored ads, looking at low bottom of funnel advertising on Amazon that's all we did for many years, right? So now what we're going to do instead and we've been dealing with this for like a year now is training up people internally that know a lot about databasing, that know a lot about business intelligence software, that know a lot about SQL and addressing things with SQL queries. And SQL is like the language you need to understand to be able to query this Amazon marketing cloud database in order to pull data out of it, and then you need to structure that data, interpret it, understand it, present it to the client. So all agencies are necessarily becoming like data brokers and are having to build fluency in this kind of technology if they want to, uh, yeah, be able to deliver for clients at that high level, and that's, of course, our main objective still and we're moving well beyond the uh bottom nin funnel now this amc stuff is is a different challenge.

Speaker 2:

Good, I can see that and like I mean this would be the question I would ask, I guess, if I was hiring any any amazon ads agency. Which is like, how much difference does it make? Like is it that you know the basic stuff is still the talents for 90 of results, or you know? Or actually do you get a massive results boost from going all the way down into all of these new ad types, funnels, everything like that?

Speaker 1:

yeah, let's stick with AMC for a second. That really is more useful if you're spending sufficient budget for you to have enough data to really analyze, or if you're using a lot of display advertising Sponsor Display or Amazon DSP. Otherwise, that's probably not going to make a huge impact Like we use AMC, for I would say like a quarter of our clients, ones that are spending a lot or spending on DSP. The other stuff I talked about earlier, the creative ad types everybody should be using that. Everybody and their brother and sister should be using that, because it is not hard to get a one-minute video made of your product.

Speaker 1:

Whether you're going to use AI or someone on Upwork or you're going to shoot it yourself, whatever, there's no excuse really for not having video content, high-quality images. There's so many ways to make these things. These days. Amazon even has their own AI feature built into the interface. You can have it generate stuff. Now, is it always amazing? Does it always get a 100%? No, not exactly, but Does it always? Does it always do 100%? No, not exactly, but hey, I got to applaud them for trying. You know, chapeau to them for doing that. And there's no excuse not to use those things, in my opinion, especially when so many of your competitors are probably being lazy and not doing it either, at least from our experience. So many accounts PC, like I said are not doing these things yet.

Speaker 2:

And what percentage would you think are doing that? I mean, is that a big advantage for someone if they take into and do these different types of ads and everything?

Speaker 1:

yeah, think of it this way, john. Like, imagine everyone is like oh, this is our top keyword. We're just going to put a high bid on it and put it in a campaign and give it lots of budget and keep our fingers crossed. So help for the best. Well, what's your unique advantage? What's your moat? You're just going up against everyone and butting hands with them and trying to bid more. The other thing you can do is you can lower your price. That's probably going to increase your conversion rate, but then you have worse margins. You can improve your product listing, which is something we might touch on. That's going to give you, you know, half a percent or 1% conversion rate increase. Or you could try some ad types that few of your competitors are using and basically show up where they're not showing up. Okay, cool.

Speaker 1:

Now we have something interesting. We're telling a story with images. With the video, we're describing to prospective customers what our brand's all about. This is our aesthetic. That's much more interesting than just I bid more to get top slot. I'm more rich than you, I can afford to throw more of my money at this, and that's not a way to build like a sustainable business, too. With advertising, we're still very conscious of the balance between organic and advertising and try not to rely too much on ads. There's a threshold there we don't want to cross over 100%.

Speaker 2:

I was going to say that that would be a great clip that we took out for a social media post how much more money you have and how much you can afford to throw at everything, which we will never do. That.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's the reality these days, isn't it, john? There's a lot of categories in Amazon where I would advise people not to jump in unless they have really deep pockets and they're willing to say okay, we can afford to spend $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 US on a really aggressive launch in a crowded category because we know that we have the deep pockets to do that and we understand this niche, or we understand this keyword customer demand or customer intent really well. Yeah, if you're trying to launch in something that has a bunch of products that look similar to yours, the time for that has passed. You know, amazon 2018, 2019 was years ago now. So either have a time machine or have deep pockets and be able to fund that launch and really test for success there cool.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, I mean, let's dive into that a bit there. How does the ppc launch work these days? So I guess gone are the days where you just picked your top three keywords and spend all the money yeah, I.

Speaker 1:

I think the more focused approach these days is to pick a number of keywords that you're going to focus in on and if you had talked to me even a few weeks ago, I would say set up exact match campaigns. But the nature of match types on Amazon advertising is also changing a little bit, so there might be an opportunity for someone who's launching to use what's called broad match modified, which is where you put a plus sign in front of multiple keyword that you're putting in, and that plus sign means Amazon must include that in the search, so that's another way to do it. But basically, you want to use a match type that's tight enough and is restricted enough that you're spending in a focused manner on a certain keyword and you want to make sure that you're listing as a line as best as possible with that keyword. And my advice would be don't try to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, Himalayan mountain range first. Like if you're selling something like a supplement, don't just go for the obvious Bing keyword. You can probably take a lot of ancillary keywords, longer tail keywords and kind of get ranked on those, get exposure on those longer tail keywords and kind of get ranked on those, get exposure on those, get sales on those and build credibility with Amazon, build credibility in their eyes as a seller that's worthy of being put in the rotation. That's what Amazon's really doing. They're rotating out products and testing things all the time and seeing is this product going to convert if we put it at the top of search organically for this keyword, and will it stick?

Speaker 1:

So if you do stick for those other keywords, let's call them like tertiary, secondary keywords. First, you're building your credibility, you're building your sales history in order to tackle the big keywords. To use a cycling analogy, just for fun, you wouldn't try to climb like Mount Fontou, which is like a very difficult climb here in France before you scaled all of your local hills first and made sure to do a lot of training and practice right. You wouldn't just go for the biggest one. And those are the same keywords, like I alluded to earlier, that you're going to have to have a big budget to throw money at too.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, I think the more intelligent approach these days is really calibrate that listing towards the keywords. Go for those longer tail, easier keywords and build your way up to the big one, and then, yeah, just make sure you have enough budget to throw at it. And you know, doing external traffic simultaneously is really good in Google traffic. I know TikTok just inked a deal with Amazon. We don't know the full details on that just yet, but considering these other traffic sources besides just Amazon ads and simultaneously sending all that to the listing is probably a good move. You know, use your email list, use your social presence. You want to put everything in concert in order to really give yourself the best shot at it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you're saying about the big budgets and deep pockets, like how do you guide your clients on what a decent budget is for a launch these days?

Speaker 1:

Hmm, yeah, yeah, that's a back and forth conversation with them. I'm not sure how specific I can be because I'm not at the table for some of these conversations these days. A lot of our senior account managers and comms people are. They're the ones who are responsible for having that really close back and forth with the clients. There's a good number of our clients I do speak to, especially if they're considering entering a new market. Let me have clients that are saying this is our brand, but we're considering making a new brand over here, new market. Let me have clients that are saying, well, this is our brand, but we're considering making a new brand over here. I'll often talk to them about that, but I think it comes from their budget allocation they think is reasonable, and then we'll often work off an estimate for spend over a couple months period and then we'll send that back over to them and say this is the kind of range of spend we expect to be able to go through, based on the demand for keywords we've seen. Maybe we have some experience in their niche or sub-niche because they're already selling in it, or we have another client that does. So we have some insight into historical CPCs Because those are very different across different markets and sub-niches. Right, there are some places on Amazon where you can still spend 50 cents a click. It's just that those aren't the most competitive categories. And there are others where, yeah, you could easily spend upwards of four or five, six dollars per click. We like to land somewhere in between usually.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, yeah to your question. Sorry, I'm not sure if I answered it really well, but the budgetary conversation. You can't put a fixed number on it. It has to be a back and forth with the client and our experience and then we'll set aside an amount of money to do it. I guess the most important thing, john, is to set expectations and say, hey, no one here is expecting we're going to get an ACOS of like 25% right out the gate. You need to be comfortable with spending in the red on ACOS for a while. But what you're looking at is organic rank, bsr what kind of impact you're having on the market? Yeah, those rank. Uh, you know bsr what kind of impact you're having on the market? Um, yeah, those things are more important at first than it costs. It costs as a secondary metric you worry about later on yeah, I identify with that.

Speaker 2:

So I mean, it sounds, from what you're what you're saying, like the landscapes actually changed quite a lot as an agency as well, because you know, back in the day back in 2015 I guess it was we set up, you know, not not as basic as this but we set up some games, some campaigns for you, we manage them, we run them, you make money, we make money, you know. So can you talk us through that a bit? It sounds like you now have like a production guidance data analytics seems like things have changed quite a lot in the amazon advertising space in the last nine years that's true.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, when you put it that way, that's true. Um, I will thing, which is and this is just being totally honest like advertising management is a largely undifferentiated offer these days, right, so if you're an agency that's doing just ads, you don't really have too much to stand on, and this is why we, as a company, have diversified. So we do a lot of content work with clients now to help them improve their conversion rates, because even a 0.5 or 1% conversion rate is going to drastically improve our advertising outcomes. We make sure that they have good store pages. We're getting into some light out management stuff not full account management because we find that there are some clients that have great products but they just don't have their house in order in some other areas and they need assistance with that.

Speaker 1:

We refer a lot of work out to various partners, like to you guys, of course, the seller entity. You know the stuff that you do is not something we touch at all and requires a different set of skills and expertise right there. So happy to you know, send people your way, for that matter. Same thing with, like, warehousing financing. You know we have a bunch of partners we refer people to, but you're right that we have to, as an agency, have a data team, essentially a reporting team. We have to have data infrastructure and analytics backend. We use other tools for that and of course, the costs for those also amount. So we need to figure out a way to make those a value add for the client so that they'll be willing to basically pass through the cost and so they get a benefit.

Speaker 2:

It pays for what we're doing and everyone's happy, okay, so now we're moving into the part of the show where we talk about a unique or controversial opinion that you have on the Amazon landscape or e-commerce industry. So what would you like to share? Brent, get off your chest.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, sure. So I think this is actually counterintuitive for someone that's coming on the show to ostensibly talk about ads, right, john. But my feeling is actually, because advertising is such a let's call it sexy component of Amazon, right, it's like you're talking about spending money. You're talking about doing all this work, this set of these complicated systems of campaigns and creative and thinking about new ways to attract consumers to come to your brand. And there's a psychology element which is always my favorite part. There's a data element which a lot of people nerd out about. It's really cool, right? Everyone loves that.

Speaker 1:

But what we often notice is that people spend all this time, energy and, of course, lots of money with advertising, tweaking, testing and just doing like huge amounts of work on advertising, even on smaller budgets, like you know, sub 10K a month, I would consider like a small account, right, if you're spending that much. But in reality, what they should do is put time and energy into doing CRO, so conversion rate optimization using tools that are out there Kikfu comes to mind as one example. They have good like A-B testing. There's also the MYE and manager experiments. That builds into Seller Central. That's one we use heavily and manage your experiments. That's built into Seller Central. That's one we use heavily. There's other tools, the name of which I can't remember, that give you, like, an Amazon-ish results page and you have people select from that. But these are all ways to get to a better conversion rate and update and adapt your product listing in light of new competitors, either domestically or from abroad in the marketplace you're selling. Shifting market conditions, like is demand for your product waning or waxing? Seasonality is a big one and just general Amazon SERP changes and Amazon marketplace shifts. So if your product listing looks the same as it did two and a half to even one year ago, that's probably a bigger thing for you to tackle than going around and seeing what newest Amazon advertising tool or hack or tip is in a Facebook group or your paid form that you joined or whatever, and then applying that. It's probably better to actually go back to your listing and work on those fundamentals rather than putting more time and energy in advertising. My advice would be to you, business owner hire somebody for advertising, whether they be an agency, a tool or internal, and let them worry about that. You should stick to things like product sourcing and keeping costs down, warehousing, logistics and, yeah, working with a team, hopefully, you have in place that's going to do listing, optimization for conversion rate and shifting markets.

Speaker 1:

So many times we talk to clients and we're like, hey, when's the last time you updated this image? And they're like, oh, I don't know, like three years ago. It's like, oh, come on please. And another thing about images of course, the image for sponsored products that we talked about is your advertisement. So not only are you changing your image for increasing your conversion rate when people actually arrive at your listing, but you might actually boost your click-through rate on the ad itself. So there's all kinds of reasons to do that, but we find that people get really lazy about it. So I guess my take, john, to sum it up, is you know, hands off the ads, go over to the manager experiments and start to run some experiments. That module is free and it's amazing that it exists, so please use it 100.

Speaker 2:

Agree there. You know. I think advertising agencies that don't focus on conversion are missing something. You know.

Speaker 2:

If you ask you know I would advise anyone who's looking for an ad agency to ask them what they think about conversion and if they say we don't touch it, to be like, oh, that's very interesting, they already guide you on it or give you some kind of feedback on it, because it massively affects their results. So, yeah, I like that your controversial take involves hiring you, which is also always a great controversial take. Hire Brent and then focus on the other stuff.

Speaker 1:

I mean, like I said maybe before the call, john, there's a lot of ways to get your ads done these days. There's tools. There's a lot of ways to get your ads done these days. There's tools, there's agencies, there's in-house people. All are equally valid, I agree.

Speaker 2:

I 100% agree. I first talked to Brent. We've known each other a long time. I know you're going to look after them, so if you are interested. You should definitely talk to Brent. Okay, so we're wrapping up towards the end. If people do want to talk to Brent or one of your amazing team at AMZ Pathfinder, what's the best way to follow you or get in touch?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, sure, I think my preferred method these days would be LinkedIn. So just search for my name, brent Sarandek, on LinkedIn. I'm trying to build more of a following there. That's been a really fun exercise and probably one of my favorite social networks, even though it used to be like stodgy business. It's just actually really cool because the whole Amazon community is on there these days and it's great to like interact with everyone that you meet at trend shows and stuff. Another way to reach me on any platform social media is just brentbike. So, yes, you can use bike as a com. It is a TLD. I bought it some years ago as a joke, but I've started to actually use it. So yeah it. So yeah brentbike. If you just put in wwwbrentbike, that'll take you to my linkedin amazon pathfinders website. Uh, you know everything else that you might need cool, so check out brentbike or amzpathfindercom, is it?

Speaker 1:

that's right, dot com. Yeah, we're still there too dot com.

Speaker 2:

yeah, if you want to inquire about working together, awesome. So thank you so much for being here, brent um, and thanks to everyone else who's consumed this, watched it, listened, and if you have listened or watched and you have some kind of like button around where you are, if you could follow or like it, it will improve our results the next time. So thanks so much for being here, brent, and we'll see you all at the next episode. Thank you.

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