The Amazon Strategist Show

Transform Your Amazon Ad Spend With Expert Automation Tips

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Discover the power of Amazon advertising optimization with Nadine Schoepper, co-founder of BidX, in our new episode of the Amazon Strategist Show. Learn about the evolution of Amazon ad campaigns, the importance of day parting, and how to leverage tools like BidX to automate and optimize your advertising efforts.

Nadine shares her journey from helping her husband with Amazon FBA to creating a leading advertising optimization platform. Get valuable insights on when to use different ad types, how to approach budgeting, and the potential pitfalls of unrealistic Amazon selling expectations.

Whether you're a seasoned seller or just starting, this episode offers practical strategies to enhance your Amazon business performance.
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Connect with Nadine and BidX
Website: https://www.bidx.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadine-schopper/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@getBidX
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LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/thejohncavendish

Know More About Seller Candy
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Speaker 1:

If you don't know your numbers, if you don't know the financial background of the business. I've seen people who sold products and they lost money with every product they sold. And then they were mad at us because we increased their sales with ads and they were mad at us because they lost money with every sale.

Speaker 2:

Hello, I'm your host, ron Kavanagh, and welcome to season three of the Amazon Strategy Show. The show that's all strategy, with no hacks, no silver bullets and no magic pills, just real, practical strategies for your Amazon business. So today we have a very special guest. We have Nadine Schupper, a co-founder of BidX I hope I didn't budge that A platform that automates and optimizes Amazon advertising for sellers. With a strong background in digital marketing, e-commerce and data analytics, she has been instrumental in establishing Bidex as the leading tool for increasing sales and profitability on Amazon. Before Bidex, nadine worked for KPMG in the field of data analytics and where she honed her expertise in leveraging data for business growth. So, nadine, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, john, I'm really happy to be here and thank you for having me.

Speaker 2:

Well, welcome and it's really nice to have a fellow European. I mean, I was European. Now, you know, is England Europe, but a fellow European on the show. So how did you originally get into the Amazon ecosystem?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, I was still in college when I met my husband, max, and he was selling on Amazon himself. At that time he was selling baby safety products and until then I had no clue. I was just an Amazon customer. But I had no clue about the whole Amazon selling ecosystem and he was kind of introducing me into it and I started to help him out with packing stuff and everything in the background. So I kind of learned the in and outs about Amazon FBA and at that time he was responsible for the ads. So actually he had a partner and his part was also to manage the Amazon ads and my background was computer science and business information systems. So he kind of asked me if I could automate the ads for him, because at that time it was 2017. There was no tool that could automate it. And that's kind of how we came up with the idea of Bidex. And Max had the background in Amazon FBA and I had the background in computer science. So it was the easy conclusion for us to code our own software.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. I didn't know that We've talked before at other events and I didn't know that you were the geek behind Dex in the first place. That's awesome.

Speaker 1:

I wouldn't call myself a geek anymore. I mean, we have a bunch of developers now. They are way better than I've ever been, but I feel like it's really helpful to also, as a founder, kind of understand the whole development part in the background, even though I'm not coding anymore, but it was actually a lot of fun. Also, with my background in KPMG and data analytics. I always like to solve problems and I'm still like I feel like most developers don't like bug fixing, but that's actually what I like most.

Speaker 2:

So well, I didn't code in probably four years now, but it's, it's fun, that's awesome, though I mean, and you say, like any founder that tries to found a tech product without being able to code, I've seen you know, very rapidly fail or realize they built in the wrong code base or the wrong structure and then have to rebuild again. So yeah, awesome. I mean good that you can be the technical co-founder Super cool, so yeah. So when you started approaching it, what kind of campaign types did you initially start with and how has that developed, you know, over time, running the software.

Speaker 1:

So, like in the beginning, there wasn't much. When we started in 2017, amazon ads were very rudimental. It was only sponsored product ads and, at that time, probably also sponsored brands, but it was all pretty simple, also with the match types. So also the software we created in the beginning was pretty simple and we kind of had to develop further and further around Amazon. So we started with sponsored product ads and that's always what sellers should do and then sponsored brands is more for brand awareness and to show your products like other pages, not only in the search results, and we also recommend to still use sponsored brands, especially in Europe. You have like smaller or lower CPCs for sponsored brands, so it's pretty useful in Europe, too, to use them. And then over the time, there was also sponsored display.

Speaker 1:

That came to sponsored ads for Amazon and with that you can also do like retargeting campaigns, which is pretty useful. Besides that, you also have Amazon DSP, which is the demand side platform, and the DSP is pretty powerful too, and it's not only Amazon sellers who can use the DSP, but also other providers, let's say, like an insurance company could use Amazon DSP. So Amazon is collecting a lot of data and we can use this data to advertise, for example, the insurance or, for example, a car car and Amazon knows like which car are you driving, do you have a pet? What is your income? They know everything about you because you're purchasing everything there. A lot of people do.

Speaker 1:

So, they can use this data and that's what the demand side platform, the Amazon DSP, does. So that's also very, very powerful, but it's not necessarily a product that you should use in the beginning. So when should you use DSP then? Like we usually say that you should start with DSP when you leverage the sponsored product ads to the fullest. So when you have like an ad spend of 15,000 in sponsored product ads, that I would say is like an average amount where people start to also use DSP. And then for the DSP, you should have like a minimum budget of 5,000 a month. Otherwise it doesn't really make sense. So you really have to get some traction there. And DSP is.

Speaker 1:

There are two, let's say three use cases. First is brand awareness in general, so it's a lot of bigger brands who also use the DSP. Then you have retargeting campaigns there too, and the retargeting campaigns, compared to sponsored display ads, are way more detailed, so you have more possibilities to actually target these retargeting campaigns. And then, let's say, you have a product, so you can also use the DSP for launch, even if you're a smaller seller. But it makes sense, for example, when you have a product where there is no search volume for it. So it's a very innovative product. For example, there is no search volume. You don't know which keywords could fit to the product because it's kind of a new product. Then you could also use the DSP and work with audiences instead of keywords there. So that makes sense, sense too Nice, cool.

Speaker 2:

That makes a lot of sense. And then all of this can be managed within BidX's software, kind of yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:

So we started with the PPC only because DSP wasn't that of a big thing at that time when we started. But then four years ago we also started to do DSP, and at that time it was all manually still, so there was no API. But Amazon also opened up an API for the DSP. So now we also implemented DSP into our tool and we can actually automate it too.

Speaker 2:

Nice and and with the way Amazon's changed advertising in the last you know, really several years, does the software also support that? You know different types of content and you know video ads and everything like that. Can you also manage that?

Speaker 1:

Definitely yeah. So everything that Amazon is doing, we try to implement immediately too. As soon as it's available through the API, we have it in our system as well, and we are aiming to the point that the seller doesn't have to log into the ads console at all anymore. They can just use bidx and do everything there I love it.

Speaker 2:

That's really cool. So just to change that slightly, I know before this, before we started recording, we were talking about day parting, which I'd never actually heard of in that term before, but you know whether that's stopping advertising or turning budgets up and down. Can you tell us a little bit about day partying and how it works and how we should use it?

Speaker 1:

So day partying necessarily means that you can increase bids and budgets, but you can also turn off the whole campaign and we use it, for example, for the lead-up phase before deal days. Let's say it's Prime Day and then you increase the bids and budgets for the two weeks before the actual Prime Day. And we also did a study internally which showed that most sales on Prime Day had a touch point with ads before, within the two weeks before the actual Prime Day. So it's really important, before we have a deal day, to use this lead up phase and prime the buyers to buy your product instead of your competitors. And then it's also when you have, for example, a product that sells very well, for example at night.

Speaker 1:

Let's say you are selling a gaming computer, so, and you know your customers are mostly awake at night, for example, and then it makes sense to increase your bits of budgets at night and decrease it during the day. Or you are selling, I don't know, let's say, a mouse for just offices, and they usually buy their stuff in the morning at 10. So when you see there are any trends and we actually like in our tool, you can see the trends, so you can see like for every day and every hour. You can see how the search volume and the conversion rate is for these hours, and and so you can, accordingly to that, you can increase and decrease your bids and budgets, which is pretty powerful nice.

Speaker 2:

So quick clarification on that, because I, you know, I haven't been a seller for a while. To be honest, I've been a service provider, doing what we don't. We fight the good fight with seller support, but we don't. I haven't been an you know advertiser in a while. Back in the day, when I was a seller, we always thought that budgets took ages to respond as an average of the weekly amount. These days, when you change the budget, how quickly does it respond and how accurate can you be on a daily basis if you're playing with budgets?

Speaker 1:

So it usually takes only a few hours to get into account. So I wouldn't say that it's like we've seen that also in the past that it took like a few days, but it's not that case anymore. So Amazon also responds more quickly, and now that they also have like the Amazon stream, where they also have to be more responsive to what you send to them and then you get like real-time data too back from them, they can't really afford to take days to take new changes into account so it's no longer an average of their week.

Speaker 2:

So if you increase it and decrease it and spend more, it doesn't it doesn't affect your days further down the week by changing that anymore yeah no, no, awesome. Cool. Well, I learned something new every day. Super cool. What kind of stuff have you seen experience work the best in terms of day partying? What works best for your clients?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So what we really like is for day partying. You can not only do it like based on the search volume or for the conversion rate, but you can also do it based on the bestseller ranking. So let's say you have your product is at place 10 right now, but you really want it to be in the top three. Then you can also increase the budgets and boost your product with that, and we see that a lot. And what you can also do is based on your inventory. So let's say your inventory is low and you don't really want to spend more money on advertising because you don't want to sell out your last products with ads. Then you can just decrease your budgets and bids too. So that's what we've seen a lot that people use and where they're really thankful for, because there is no other solution which else actually helps you with your best seller ranking or your inventory level nice and I guess can you set up automations in your software.

Speaker 2:

So this, if this, then that, because otherwise this would be a lot of work if you're doing this yourself in the back end of seller central exactly.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's how we do it. You just create some rules, how you'd like to have, and then the tool's doing everything for you and we get the bestseller ranking on a daily basis. So we know what your product is ranking right now. We know your inventory levels from Amazon or from third-party tools too, and then from there we can optimize it.

Speaker 2:

Very cool. Yeah, that sounds like an awesome tool. I wish I had had the tool in the past. Thank you, Just out of interest. So once you've, once you're doing the standard optimization standard, I mean, do you have? What options do you have in terms of optimization? Can you optimize towards ACOS or TACOS? It's the budget and it's the bestseller ranking.

Speaker 1:

So that's what, and still, like most of the people still optimize towards the ACOS and the TACOS, and I mean that makes sense. Especially the TACOS became pretty popular over the past years, I would say and yeah, we see that a lot still in use for our clients.

Speaker 2:

What do you think is best?

Speaker 1:

I would also use the tacos or the bestseller ranking. It depends on what my need is. What do I want to achieve? Is it a launch and do I want to have the most brand awareness, or in which phase of my product am I? Do I just want to like make money with the product or do I want to build a brand? So that's like always kind of the trade off and then for like big brands, they usually work with budgets so they have like strict rules. We have a budget of 20,000 a month for this product and we don't want to exceed this. We don't really care much about the acos or the tacos or whatever, which is insane in my opinion. I mean, when the acos or tacos is very good, I mean, spend more money on advertising in that case, so that you can like leverage everything like you can also like yeah, more profit, you can increase your ranking.

Speaker 1:

You can maybe like when you sell more, you can get like lower. More profit you can increase your ranking. You can maybe like when you sell more you can get like lower prices for buying your stuff in china or whatever. Like it's the whole ecosystem like around it, like the, the flywheel of ppc, how we call it, and um, but still like bigger brands still want to use their budget system, so we provide it I love it.

Speaker 2:

This sounds really cool, okay. Well, there's one more question on my list, which was about, uh, working with your spouse. And you know, personally I know we talked about before I've worked with my spouse, but only for a short amount of time. I mean, how has it been co-founding a company together and working hand in hand for the last many years?

Speaker 1:

I would say it's like it's challenging sometimes, but it also has its advantages. So, like also in the beginning and still now, we are traveling a lot together and we are experiencing a lot together. Together and we are experiencing a lot together. So max and I spent the last three years together in the us for three months each because we opened up a us subsidiary in 2021. So, um, we are traveling a lot, we are experiencing a lot, and so we are also grow together kind of. But it's also challenging to go home and then have your spouse and co-founder there and, of course, we are still talking about um, company stuff there, about any issues that we have, and sometimes it's really hard to say, no, let's just be a couple now and not talk about business anymore. Um, but it's also fun.

Speaker 2:

I mean, it's like best friends in life and business, so it's kind of fun too I think it's awesome, yeah, and it's really cool working with people you're very good friends with. I know spouse is different, but still, like uh, it's very good working with close friends because it just makes things, yeah, more enjoyable, doesn't?

Speaker 1:

it and it's also like max and I we really complement each other. So, um, and what I think is really important, I would not be the person who would found a company on my own. I would always want to have a founding team and when you found a company, in my opinion, it's very important that you have, like, different skill sets that come together and that you complement each other. And, for example, he is he is the visionary that come together and that you complement each other. And, for example, he is the visionary.

Speaker 1:

He's always thinking big and I'm like more detailed, I'm more analytic, so at the same time I'm also more emotional. So it's kind of a good mix which makes it successful for us to build a team and to grow the company.

Speaker 2:

That's amazing. Sounds like an amazing partnership.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thank you, I would say so.

Speaker 2:

So, changing tacks slightly, we are going to the next part, where we talk about our most debatable or controversial opinion related to the Amazon or e-commerce industry. Like what's your controversial opinion, nadine?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, my controversial opinion is that I feel like there are a lot of coaches and also agencies or providers out there who just promised you to become a millionaire quick. Especially for coaches, but also agencies for different like all over agencies, but also PPC agencies who just promise you if you invest a thousand here or if you use our system, you will become a millionaire quickly. And I definitely believe that Amazon FBA is something where you can become like rich with if you put in the efforts and a little bit of starting money. But it's definitely still a job. You still have to put some efforts in it.

Speaker 1:

It's not that you just buy products in China, put them on Amazon and then it's running itself. You have to put the efforts in it and you have to be aware of it, that you have to do something for it. And when deciding for a coach or when deciding for an agency, you should always listen to what they're selling you. Are they realistic? Do they have realistic targets? And also have a look to reviews and see how trustworthy they are. Do you feel comfortable with going with them or do you feel like it's kind of sketchy?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and are they selling you on the lifestyle or are they selling you on some kind of actual concrete plan?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, it's a real business and if you do it wrong you can also get yourself in trouble. So if you don't know your numbers, if you don't know the financial background of the business, I've seen people who sold products and they lost money with every product they sold. And then they were mad at us because we increased their sales with ads and they were mad at us because they lost money with every sale. So that was kind of okay. We should, or you should, think over if this really makes sense for you right now.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, totally agree. I mean, the easiest way to make a million dollars with a business is to start with $2 million and start a business. Then you can end up with $1 million.

Speaker 1:

That sounds like a good plan. Yeah, we should do that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, 100%. It's how we become millionaires Okay, awesome, I like that. Become millionaires Okay, awesome, I like that. That's cool. So thank you so much for being on the show, nadine. If anyone wants to get in touch with you or Bidex and learn more, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 1:

The best for me would be to contact me via LinkedIn, and you can find me under my name, nadine Schöpper, there, and if you want to get in touch with bidx in general, you can use facebook, instagram, linkedin or our website, bidxio. So there are multiple ways and we will always find you if you, if you, want to get in touch with us okay, awesome.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, on linkedin I would search for nadine uh bidx, because if I tried to spell a show, but I will get out of it yeah, that works too, you're right awesome.

Speaker 2:

So thank you so much for being here, nadine. Um, it's been amazing having you on the show, and thank you to all of the listeners and everyone listening in. So if you found this episode useful, please do go check out bidx um, do that, watch the demo and also come back here and like the show. So, wherever you're watching whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts or YouTube click like, click follow. It just helps us out in getting more reach. So thank you so much for being here, nadine, and see you all next time. Everyone else.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, john, it was a pleasure.

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