How to Advertise Amazon Products
Generate Amazon Traffic – How to Advertise Amazon Products
Mike McClary and Rich Henderson joined forces to teach sellers how to advertise amazon products linking to existing Amazon traffic for increased sales. In this training video, the duo share their knowledge on these Amazon advertising options: Digital Coupons, Sponsored Product Ads, Lightning Deals, Enhanced Brand Content, and Headline Search Ads.
Amazon Advertising and Sponsored Ads
Amazon’s initial advertising tools were only available to big label companies and vendors.
Around 2013, Amazon opened the advertising systems to all sellers.
Today, there are at least five advertising tools that Amazon offers to all of its sellers: Amazon Sponsored Products, Lightning Deals, Headline Search Ads, Digital Coupons, the Amazon Store, and Enhanced Brand Content.
Sponsored Product Ads display the seller’s product together with its price, ratings, and reviews. These ads can be located anywhere on the Amazon listing page.
You can use both Automatic Targeting and Manual Targeting with your Sponsored Product Ads.
Sponsored advertising has the highest conversion rate of the Amazon advertising options. McClary encourages the use of both targeting types: Automatic Targeting and Manual Targeting, in that order.
Headline Search Ads, Lightning Deals, and Digital Coupons
Headline search ads show up at the very top of the Amazon listing screen. It is considered the most valued ad location because it is “eye-level.” Technically, these ads are the first thing the buyers see upon entering an Amazon page or searching for a product.
Being the most valued “real estate” on the page, you pay for these slots, and you, as the seller, get to create your own headline to potentially better connect with customers.
Lightning Deals are a newer option in Amazon advertising. It was just last year that Amazon opened the tool to regular sellers. With this type of ad, you can put a 20% to 40% discount on your products for either four or six hours—this massive discount can bring in more traffic, and really jump-start your sales!
Enhanced Brand Content
Enhanced Brand Content is not just an Amazon advertising system—it gives you extra tools to present your product. Enhanced Brand Content allows you to put images, banners, videos, and other text formats into your brand description section. Utilizing Enhanced Brand Content affectively can lead to increased sales, revenue, and profit through increased conversion rates.
Watch the video, or read the transcript below, to get all of the details on how to use these sources to increase your own traffic and sales.
Amazon’s Easiest Traffic Sources – Video Transcript
Mike McClary: Hey everyone. Mike McClary here, along with my buddy and Co-Creator of Amazing Selling Machine, Rich Henderson. Here for another edition of some live Amazon training on Facebook Live. So now we’re just getting started, so I’m probably going to talk for a little bit before we get into the training, and let everyone hop on and start watching this. But, I want to make sure that everyone can see and hear me, it looks like everything is live and great. Awesome. So, now if you have not yet watched of any of the other training that we have on selling on Amazon, be sure to check out some of the other Facebook Lives that we’ve been going kind of crazy on the past two or three weeks. You can check them out on the Amazing.com Facebook page. You’ll see all the recorded Facebook Lives, and that’s where this Facebook Live will show up once we’re done. It’ll automatically be there, you can watch it in case you come in late.
Then also, if you hadn’t had a chance yet, head on over to AmazingSellingMachine.com/LiveDeskSessions, and Rich is going to be posting that under the comments here, and you can signup and get notified of any future Facebook Lives that we have. And, you’ll also see the previous Facebook Lives we had there as well, so you have an easy list of the titles, and what they are. I mean, go find and watch them any time you want.
Now, also on Amazing Selling Machine, we have a full four part training series there. So, these Facebook Lives, you’re like really going deep into some really cool strategies and tactics. But on AmazingSellingMachine.com, we actually have a four part training series, completely for free, that’ll walk you through the entire business model of becoming a seller on Amazon.
We have the first part of the training, which goes over how to find a perfect hot product opportunity. And Rich Henderson, he’s the master at finding hot products. He actually came up with a list of 100 vetted product … Sorry, hot product opportunities that you can go out there, and they meet a lot of the criteria that we’re talking about. Just to show you how easy it is to find products. Now, also in that training, you’ll find all the other things you want to look at as far as reviews go, and revenue, and price, and size, and weight. And you can go through that list, and see those that actually meet all the criteria as well. And most importantly, you’ll be able to find any product out there that meets the criteria. So well above the 100. The 100’s just the tip of the iceberg. We want you to have all the information to go out there and find thousands of products that really are great opportunities to sell and make money on Amazon. That’s all done in the first training video on AmazingSellingMachine.com.
Now in the second session, we go over what’s called the, “Amazon Automation Blueprint.” This really makes the business so easy to run from anywhere in the world. So we’re going to show you once you find the right product opportunity, how to find a supplier for that product from anywhere in the world. So whether that product is sourced in the United States, in Europe, in South America, in Asia, we’ll show you how to find suppliers ready to make that product, and looking for you so they can make the product, and you can brand it under your own brand. And you can do that right from your computer. You don’t have to travel anywhere, it’s not like 30 years ago where you need to fly and jet set all over the world to meet with manufacturers. You can do it all online, it’s so much easier. In that lesson we go over that.
We also talk about the beauty of having a freight forwarder. Now, these are people that their entire business model, is how to ship products from point A, to point B. And usually that point A is thousands, and thousands of miles away. Perhaps over in China. Unless you want to sell in the United States, they make that process of getting products all the way over there, to here really easy and painless. And so, we actually go over an interview with our freight forwarder. This is the same freight forwarder that I use, that Rich uses, that Matt Clark uses, that Jason Katzenback uses, and several other people use as well. So you’ll want to hear that entire interview, and what we do is we ask the most common questions. The way I know those questions, is because two things.
One, when I started off selling, I had a lot of questions about, “What is a freight forwarder? How am I going to ship these products? What are all the customs, and duties, and tariffs, and taxes? How do I deal with that, how do I make sure that I’m following all the rules and guidelines?” Well I quickly found out that freight forwarders do all that for you, and they’re very affordable.
Now secondly, because Rich and I, we’re the Co-Creators of the Amazing Selling Machine Course, and we’ve been hearing all the questions from all of our thousands of members for the past several years. We know the common questions that we get as well, so I was sure to ask them on that call, and you can download that call and listen to it in training video number two on AmazingSellingMachine.com.
So now, once you’ve found your product, once you’ve found a supplier and way to get that product to wherever you’re going to sell, whether it’s on Amazon.com in the United States, or it’s on Amazon in the UK, or Germany, or maybe it’s Australia, or Japan, or Canada. The next thing is, you need to figure out a way to really get sales going. In training video number three, it is all about the rapid ranking system. Now, we call it the, “Rapid ranking system,” because so much of launching a product on Amazon is making sure that your product is visible, and can be found easily by the millions of people. I think it’s like 187 unique monthly visitors go to Amazon each month, that’s why it’s called monthly visitors. That’s how many people are going to Amazon to look for products. And if they can’t find your product, then you’ll have the best product in the world, and you won’t make a sale.
But in our rapid ranking system, we show you exactly how to launch a product, and get it seen easily by those people out there looking for products just like yours. And then in the fourth training video, we go over how to make this whole process even easier, how to make sure that you know exactly what to do, how to tie it all together, and how to get involved with a community of like minded people all wanting to do exactly what you want to do, change your life by running your own business.
So again, don’t do that right now. Be sure to stick on this call, and if you’re just joining as a matter of fact, on this call we’re going to go over how all the sellers on Amazon find all this unique, highly converting traffic. And all within Amazon. So don’t leave yet, be sure to check out the training afterwards. But stick around, and watch this training to find the best sources of internal traffic on Amazon.com, which is what we’re going to get into next.
As a matter of fact, I want to get right into the training. And again, if you’re just joining us, you missed out on the first part of this Facebook Live. Totally fine, this video will automatically be recorded, and it’ll show up right here on the Amazing.com Facebook page. Usually within just a few minutes of this live session being done. So stick around, watch the training, and go back and watch the beginning if you want to as well.
So now, the title of this has all to do with how to find the easiest and highest converting traffic on Amazon. And the way we do that, is by utilizing Amazon’s own internal traffic and advertising systems. Now, when we start off, Rich and I have been selling now for probably four and a half, five years. And when we started selling, this … It was a lot harder to get paid traffic. You know, for advertising systems out there, they weren’t readily available for small sellers like us. And, back then, we were just starting out, just like everyone, several people on this call are, or some of you will be shortly I hope.
But, there wasn’t an easy way to go out there and really take advantage of these different advertising systems that are out there. So, what Amazon did back in 2013, they actually came up with their release, their own advertising system called, “Sponsored product ads.” Now, it may have been used a little bit before then, but it’s in that year that they rolled it out to everyone, and really made it accessible so that it’s really easy for everyone to use. I think once I show you how easy it is to set up, you’ll realize just how powerful this system is.
Now, since then, that was such a huge success. I remember when we started selling and got access to this advertising system, it was a game changer for us. It showed us that even if you weren’t able to launch your product, and get it seen in all the organic rankings, or just the normal search results on Amazon, there was a very easy and affordable way to pay to have your product showing up right there with all the big brands out there.
That was like the first big game changer about four and a half to five years ago. Now since then, with the success of that, Amazon has taken it even a step further. Actually, several steps further. So they’ve come up with different types of internal advertising, that we now all have access to, that we never had access to before. And sometimes, some of these systems existed for a while, but only the largest companies and vendors out there had access to them. That’s all changing. Third party sellers or private label sellers like us, we are a huge part of the pie for Amazon. I think we make over 50% of all the products sold on Amazon now, and so they recognize that, and they’re making all these great advertising systems available to us. And, they’re incredibly easy to use, and they’re incredibly powerful ways to get your product seen, and to get really highly converted traffic and buyers to visit your products.
The second one they came out with … Or, I’m not going to go in order. I’m going like a different order, the way that I look at them when I actually do searching for myself. The other one you’ll see is called, “Amazon headline search ads.” So, where sponsored product ads can show up anywhere on the page. These headline search ads actually show up at the very, very top of the screen on Amazon, and they are the most valued real estate in all of Amazon. So, what I’m going to do now is I’m actually going to do some live training and showing you exactly what these look like, so you’ll recognize these when you go to Amazon as a buyer. And that way, it’ll make it more understandable when you’re selling on Amazon, what this looks like to all your customers out there.
So, let’s go out there and share my screen. There we go. All right, so I’m now on Amazon.com. Let’s imagine that I am searching for a really high quality spatula, and I just did a search for spatula. Now, when you see all these search results, unless you’re a seller you may not realize this. But, anything that says, “Sponsored,” right there, those are sponsored product ads. And, they’re great. I mean again, these products are showing up right near the top. That means the sellers of these products are paying for these ads, and they’re some of the first products that anyone buying the product will see. This is really great real estate. These ads convert really well, and they’re really easy to set up as I’ll show you later on.
Now above them at the very top in this kind of long bar at the top, this is called an, “Amazon headline search ad.” And the reason is because, you actually get to create your own headline. Where down in the sponsored product ads, all they do is show your product, and the price, and reviews. Up here as a seller, you come up with this right here, what it’s saying. It says, “High heat silicone and stainless spatulas that work.” So you have a better way of connecting with your customers. If you know they’re looking for something, let’s say that a big problem with spatulas is them sticking to the pan. You can say that, “Our silicon spatulas will never stick, in case that’s a problem that you have.” And really reach out to the problem points that your customers might be having, in order to grab their attention. And you can test all those around, and these headline search ads again, they did exist before. Now we have access to them, and anyone selling on Amazon can use those types of ads.
Now, in addition to sponsored product ads, and headline search ads, there’s also a lot of other ways out there to sell. There’s also something called, “Digital coupons.” Now, these are very, very recent, probably within the past few months they’ve been released. But again, if I do a search for spatulas, you’ll notice this product right here is the kitchen utensils, silicone heat resistant, non stick kitchen utensil set cooking tools. They probably could come up with a little bit of a better name on that one. It has a coupon, an orange coupon that says, “Save five percent with coupon.” The beauty of this digital coupon is what it’s called, is that it catches your attention. When I see that little coupon with the orange on it, that immediately says, “Hey, there’s something special about this product. I want to check it out.” And we’ve seen time and time again, that when you set up a digital coupon, you get higher conversions.
So if before only two out of five people that visited your product would buy it, it may go up to two and a half people, or three people out of five, or seven people out of 10 are buying it. Whatever it is, this helps convert. Even if the discount is only five percent, or maybe a dollar off, it still helps increase conversions. And again, these are so new, they didn’t exist when I started out. They have only existed for a few months, and we’re already seeing some great results because we now have access to this, whereas we did not before.
Now, there’s another type of, I’m going to call it advertising. But it’s something called a, “Lightning deal.” That again, a year ago, regular sellers on Amazon did not have access to what are called, “Lightning deals.” And if you buy on Amazon, you may be aware of these. These are special, either four or six hour deals, where the sellers have to discount their products, a minimum of 20% off what they’re selling it as. And, that’s a great deal. Now, a lot of sellers get really aggressive, and they get 30 or 40% off, just to drive some high volume sales, maybe get rid of inventory. Or, if you sell a lot of products over a short amount of time, this is what advanced sellers know. You will move up in the search rankings.
If I sell 50 products in a couple hours, whereas before maybe when someone’s searching, I might be on the second page of the search results. That’s enough to boost me up, possibly to the first page of search results, and I’m getting full price sales then. So these lightning deals not only bring in sales and revenue, they increase sales afterwards, ’cause you have an increased best sellers rank, an increased search ranking as well. And, you can find these yourself. If you just want to go out there and find some good deals, just go to the normal Amazon site, and go to the gold box deal site.
Or, the way I get to it, I click on, “Today’s deals.” And that’ll bring up these deals right here. As you can see, they all have a little bar telling you how many have been claimed, and also how much time is left. This one actually ended already, and they only sold 47% of their products. That may be good, maybe … It all depends what their target was. But as a seller, you decide what your product is you’re going to sell, what the discount is as long as it’s 20% or more, and also how many units you’re going to sell at that price.
Now, Amazon does have some minimum requirements. They’re not going to let you sell one or two. They’ll look at how many you’re selling over like a 30 day period, and they’ll tell you that, “Hey, we want you to give away this many units at this price in order to get this lightning deal.” But it’s usually pretty reasonable, and you can always cancel it if you don’t want it. But lightning deals, the fact that these are fairly new as well, these are awesome tools that did not exist before when we were selling on Amazon.
Now, in addition to the sponsored product ads, and the headline search ads, and these digital coupons, and the lightning deals also. There’s also other things out here that Amazon’s made recently available. There’s something called an, “Amazon store.” Which is pretty much, even if you don’t have your own website, you can have your own little website on Amazon, where you put your products. You can put images, you can even, once you get to a certain level I believe, put some videos on that page. So, don’t worry about even having a website. Eventually you’ll probably want one. But starting off, you don’t need it. Once you’re brand registered, it’s a process that involves trademarking, and getting Amazon’s approval, it can be done in as little as six months. Once you’re brand registered, you get access to these Amazon stores that you can put all your products out there, and really increase sales for your entire brand. They’re really powerful, they’ve only been released to normal sellers probably in the past six months or so.
And again, another way that Amazon is saying, “Hey, third party sellers …” Or sorry, “Private label sellers.” That’s another way of thinking of people like me, and Rich, and Matt, and Jason, who create our own products. “We value you, we want to increase your sales, so we’re going to continue to give you more and more tools, increase your sales, which helps us, which helps you.” And it helps the customers. Customers are easier … It’s easier for them to find you, and it’s also giving them a much better deal.
Now, the last tool that I’ll talk about that they recently made available, is something called, “Enhanced brand content.” What that means, is that when you actually sell your products on Amazon and someone finds your product, normally they’d just have this normal little product description at the bottom. And, it can be nice, you can put a few bold characters in there, and you might put some bullet points in there. But it’s pretty basic, and it does work.
However, with enhanced brand content, you can actually put images, you can put a banner down there, you can get all kinds of text format to make it look like a really professional page that before, only the big name brands out there used to have access to. Now that’s all changed. Once you get something called, “Brand registry,” for that as well, then you can go out there and create pages that’ll look just as good as the big brands. And what we’ve seen, is they really do increase conversions. And conversions are nothing more again, than the number of people that visit your product, and end up buying it. It’s simply, it’s a formula. How many people visited, and then you divide, you put that under the how many people actually bought. So if three out of 10 buy your product, then it’s a 30% conversion rate. Enhanced brand content increases that. So once you get that, it is the easiest way to increase your sales, revenue, and profits.
So, what I want to get into now, I don’t have time to over all these different awesome traffic opportunities that Amazon lays in front of us. But I want to get into one of them, that it was the first one, the sponsored product ads. Because, even though it was the first one and it’s the oldest one, it’s the easiest, and it’s also still the highest converting and most profitable. It just flat out works. Being able to go out there and completely control what customers are searching for, and when your product shows up, and how much you spend on it, is amazing for a business owner like myself, and Rich, Matt, Jason. It’s just unbelievable. It didn’t exist before, and trying to do this outside of Amazon, like going to Google or going to Facebook, all those are great places to find traffic. But no one knows your customer as well as Amazon does. And, Amazon lets you track exactly how well these ads are performing. This, sponsored product ads, is still the easiest and best type of ad to use.
So let’s go out there, and actually look at it. So I’m pulling up real live account. This is kind of a playground that Matt Clark and I use. It’s called, “Fury Fitness.” You can go out there and see our products in real time. We do operate it as a business, but we use it for training like this as well, and we like to have fun and test new things out there, and throw our products up there, test new strategies, so that we always know what is working and what’s not working. That’s why I’m showing you right inside my live account. I want to pull up these Amazon sponsored products campaigns, and show you how easy it is to set one up.
All you need to do to find this menu, is go to advertising, and campaign manager. And again, if you’re already selling on Amazon, you may already know how to do this. If you’re not, then when you do start selling, and I hope you do very soon, you’ll see exactly how easy this is. And you can start running these from the very first day that you’re selling. There’s no requirement or anything. As long as you’re set up as a seller on Amazon, you can use these ads from day one.
So if I want to create my first ad campaign, let’s imagine that I’m going to sell a product like olive oil spray. If you say my previous training from earlier in the week on launching a product, you’ll actually know that I have a test product in my account. It’s a big brand name olive oil sprayer, and allows me to show exactly what it looks like to set campaigns like this up.
So the first thing I’m going to do, we’re going to give this campaign a name. We’re going to call it the, “Olive oil sprayer for launch,” campaign. And then we’re going to give it a budget. Now, you can go as small as one dollars a day, or you can go as big as thousands of dollars a day. I like to start off small. There’s no point in really going out there and spending a lot of money on advertising, until you know it’s working. That’s the beauty of these type of campaigns, they are unbelievably scalable. You can test it out for a small amount, and once you find out what’s working, and what’s not working, you tweak the campaign, you increase what you’re spending on the search terms that are working, and you decrease or cut out completely the search terms that just aren’t working for you. But I’ll start out with a $10 budget. That’s usually what I do to start out.
The start date, I’m going to make it today. It is January 26, 2018. And for the end date, I’m going to leave it open. Now, you could actually set it at an end date and say that, “I’m only going to run this for one week, or one month, or six months.” I by default, leave it open and just let it run all the time. Because that way if I found out that it’s working really well, well it’s never going to end. It’s going to keep bringing me in sales. And if I find out that it’s not working well, well I can go in at any point in time, and I can pause or end this campaign. So you don’t really have to worry about ever having to, and I know, get to keep the campaign going on. You can end it any point in time that you want to.
Now, the beauty of these types of campaigns for new sellers, like some of you that might be out there, or even for me. I still use these, is that Amazon added something about a year or so ago called, “Automatic targeting.” And you’ll see it on here, targeting. There’s two types, automatic, and manual. It used to be that manual was the only way to do it. Now, I’m actually going to go over manual first. Manual targeting means that you know your product, and you know exactly what customers are searching for when they want to buy a product like yours. So in my previous example, I know people might be looking for spatulas. So I would enter that as a keyword that I’m going to bid on, and have my products show up when a customer searches for spatulas. I also might think that they look for kitchen cooking utensils, or they might look for cooking tools, or they might search for silicon spatulas, or metal spatulas.
So if I have a really good understanding what they’re searching for, that’s where I want to use a manual targeting campaign. However, one thing I’ve realized, this is a very humbling business, and no matter how successful you are, someone else always knows more than you do. And in this case, it’s Amazon. They always know more than I do, ’cause they know all their customers out there. So what I always do for every product, instead of going straight for that manual targeting campaign, I’m going to go for something called, “Automatic targeting.”
What this does, is this kind of puts the ball in Amazon’s court. It says that, “Amazon, here’s my product, here’s my budget. I’m starting it today. You go out there, and you show this product to who you think wants to buy it. And then tell me if I’m making any sales.” And the beauty of that is, so they’re going to put your product out there, they’re going to put it for all kinds of search terms. They’re actually going to test it. They’ll have it show up when people are searching for maybe cooking tools, utensils, spatulas. They’ll also have this ad show up when other people’s products that are similar to yours, are being looked for. So, that’s one of the really cool things about automatic targeting. It’s not just keywords, they’re going to put your ad out there on competitors products. Kind of a cool feature to have.
So, after a while, usually after about two weeks, Amazon starts optimizing this for you. What I mean by optimizing is, they’re going to go through, and they’re going to see what keywords are working for you, and they’re going to see what search terms are not working for you. And they will cut off the ones that aren’t working, and they will increase bids on the ones that are working.
Now, the really cool thing about that is, it’s kind of on autopilot. You let Amazon run with it, and it should turn profitable. However, what I like even more about Amazon’s automatic targeting ads, is that the data that you get from these is unbelievable. Not only is Amazon working on my behalf and really trying to get me sales out there. I get to see all the different searches that all these customers did when they were looking for my product. I’m going to see the exact searches that they did when they bought my product, and sometimes even just as importantly, I’m going to see the exact searches that they made when they did not buy my product. Because maybe I’m wasting money, maybe I’m wasting money on if I have a silicon spatula, and people are searching for metal spatulas, chances are they’re not going to buy mine. And I’ll see that they’re searching for that and not buying it, and I can actually tell Amazon then, “Hey, don’t show my product when they’re searching for these keywords.” That’s called, “Negative search terms,” or, “Negative keywords.”
You put those out there in your campaign, you can keep adding to them, keeping removing to them, and keep optimizing that campaign as it goes on and on, and your campaigns get better and better, and more and more profitable over time.
Let’s show you how to do this, automatic targeting is dead simple. I’ll continue to the next step here. So now I have to go out there and just give it an ad group name. The way it breaks down, you have a campaign, below that campaign you have multiple ad groups, and the way I look at that, that’s kind of like multiple products. I can have one ad group for one product, I can have one ad group for all my products. It’s very, very flexible, the way that Amazon makes it available for you. But I like going out there and having one campaign for one product. My ad group is just going to be for one product, so I’ll probably call it just, “The olive oil sprayer ad group.” Just to keep things simple.
And then I’m going to search for my product out here. I’m going to do a search for olive. There is that product right there, the Misto Brushed Aluminum Olive Oil Sprayer. I select it, and then I can scroll down and finish up the campaign. It’s going to tell me the product that I will be advertising, and now in addition to the budget we talked about, that’s your daily budget, the maximum you’re willing to spend when it comes to your entire advertising campaign. We also get to tell Amazon how much you’re willing to spend each time someone clicks on your advertisement. Now, this will be the max, so you actually will probably get clicks and traffic much less than this. You need to tell them the highest you’re willing to bid.
You’ll notice that they’re giving me a suggested bid of 90 cents, and they’re also telling me that the range is anywhere from 40 cents, up to three dollars and 50 cents. That’s a really big range, probably because spatulas are … Or, I’m sorry, these olive oil sprayers are very, very common, and are pretty competitive. So, I can either go really conservative and only say, only to 40 cents. Or I can be really aggressive, and try and get a lot of sales with three dollars and 50 cents. The way I decide that, is I know my product. I have to know how much I’m selling it for, I have to know how much it’s costing me, and I have to know therefore, what my profit margin is. What fees Amazon are going to take away as well, so that if I’m selling this for 19.99, if my profit margin is 35%, then that’s going to be around a seven dollar profit margin.
And so, would I really want to spend three dollars and 50 cents every time someone clicks on it? Because chances are, I’m not going to make that sell every time someone clicks on it. So let’s say that out of every five clicks I get a sell. That means that I’ve spent, what? 17.50, and only made seven and a half dollars, or seven dollars. So that’s not really a good business model right there, so I’m going to lower my bid. So, you have total control over this, you can change it any time. I always like starting off small. I’m going to start off at 50 cents for the maximum click. And then the way to finish up this ad campaign, is simply click, “Save and finish.” And then you are done. Your automatic campaign is up and running. You’ll start getting in sales data within a few days. And then you’ll really start getting great data within one to two weeks.
Now, the beauty of getting that data in again, is being able to actually set up manual ad campaigns. ‘Cause one of the tricks to creating a really profitable business, and really profitable ad campaigns, is to run both automatic and manual campaigns. The way you do that, is you run these automatic campaigns like we have right here, and then when you see which search terms are really profitable for you, you want to put those into a manual ad campaign. ‘Cause what happens in these automatic campaigns, I have to tell Amazon that I’m willing to spend the same dollar amount every time someone searches for my product. So it could be generic spatula term, I’m willing to spend 50 cents on. But, the best silicone spatula, I’m still willing to spend 50 cents on. Because in this automatic campaign, I only have one bid for all the search terms.
Now, when I know which search terms are actually really profitable for me, I might want to spend more money on that particular term. So that’s when you create a manual campaign, and you can change the bids for each search term, because each search term might be of more value to you. If I know that two out of five people are searching for spatulas and buying my product, but I know that three out of five people when they search for silicon spatula, are buying my product. Well, that keyword is more profitable to me, and therefore I can afford to spend more money on that one. That’s why the manual ad campaigns end up being awesome in conjunction with these automatic campaigns once you’ve run these for a while.
So, let me show you then how to actually setup the manual campaign. I’m just going to exit right out of here, going to go right to the campaign manager. I’m going to create a new campaign, just like we did there. And now I’m going to call this the, “Manual olive oil sprayer.” My daily budget is still going to be $10. I’m still going to start it today, I’m still going to leave the end date as open ended, and end it any point in time I want to. But I’m going to select manual targeting. This is where it gets a little bit different. Still have to create an ad group. Let’s call this the, “Manual olive oil sprayer ad group.” Let’s go find our product again. You can just search for olive if you want to. There’s the product. I’m going to select it.
It’s showing us there, I still need to pick my default bid. Don’t get hung up on this. This means that if I have 20 keywords I’m adding to this campaign, by default, Amazon’s going to bid 75 cents or whatever I put in here. But I have the ability to change each one of those, so let’s just say it’s going to be 50 cents like the last one. Bid plus is another option you can choose here. I don’t like use bid plus. It’s very similar to headline search ads. It means that sometimes if Amazon thinks that your ad is working really well, they may actually put it into the headline search position at the top that I showed you earlier. And, they may spend up to 50% more than what your actual bid is.
The reason I don’t like using that, is because on normal headline search ads like I showed you before, you actually control the headline. I can create some kind of eye catching headline to really reach out to my customers, and grab their attention. With bid plus, you can’t do that. It’s just going to show your product at the top, without any fancy headline. It’ll just be the product itself. For me, I want to control what I’m saying to the customers if I’m spending money for that very top position. So I leave that blank.
Now, here’s the really cool thing about manual campaigns. We talked about these automatic campaigns that go out there, and Amazon puts the right keywords out there for you, they test them and everything. Well manual campaigns, they still give you a good idea of what they think you can actually … What keywords will work for you. Because it knows that I’m selling an olive oil sprayer, they’re going out here and suggesting these keywords for us. There is the spray bottle for olive oil, I’m going to select that. There’s the Misto Oil Sprayer, that sounds good. Oil spray bottle, I don’t know. Maybe that’s a different type of oil, it might not be actually a cooking olive oil. There is olive oil sprayer though, Misto Olive Oil Sprayer, oil sprayer for cooking, that one’s good. And I can continue going on down this list, and then I could just … Or, I could hit select all. And what’ll happen, is it’s going to keep adding them down here.
Now, what they’re going to show you here, is that … Excuse me. Even though I set my default bid as 56 cents, I can actually change this to whatever I want it to be, and they’re going to tell me what they actually think for that keyword, a good bid is. I’m going to grab a drink of water here. So in this situation, I’m actually going to choose the, “Apply all.” And the beauty of that, is I’m going to use Amazon’s own knowledge, and I’m going to use what they think is the best bid for each one of these keywords. Excuse me, sorry about that guys. I’m going on and on, talking for a while here.
Now, once I’m done with this, all I need to do is click, “Save and finish.” And we are done creating an Amazon manual search campaign. So in a perfect world, I have an automatic campaign running, I have let it run for a while, I get great data. And then I create this manual campaign using some of the data that they tell us right here. I can also look through that automatic campaign, find out what’s really working for me, and also add those keywords here. I can do that by going up here and clicking on, “Provide your own keywords.” So let’s imagine that I knew that, “The best olive oil sprayer,” is a search term people are actually looking for. I can simply type it in here, and add it also to this list down here. And you’ll notice, I now have six keywords, and then there is that keyword there. So I get the great benefits of Amazon suggesting keywords, and I also get the benefit of adding my own. It’s an incredibly powerful advertising system.
So instead of saving and finishing, because this is just a test. I’m going to switch out of here, and then I’m going to go back over, and stop sharing for a moment, and see Rich. I don’t know, are we getting any questions? ‘Cause I haven’t really been able to watch the Facebook Live. Rich Henderson by the way, who does a lot of selling on Amazon, and knows a lot about sponsored product ads. He’s actually in the background watching all the Facebook comments, he’s going to be answering questions, and he’s going to be telling me if there’s any questions that we need to get to and answer. So, how we looking so for Rich?
Rich Henderson: Yeah, so we’ve either got a very, very shy crowd, or your training is just so awesome no one needs to ask any questions. But … So Jaclyn asks, “How much should we invest for launch? Is $10 enough?” I guess she’s talking about when you first switch on your ads.
Mike McClary: Ah, that’s a great question and there is no one single answer. What I typically tend to do is I will bid anywhere from 10 to $20 a day for an overall budget. Now, here’s the beauty. A lot of people when they look at their sponsored product ads, they’re going to see a figure called, “A cost.” It’s the Average Cost of a sale. And it’s shown as a ratio, like 40%, or 50%. And what that means is, every time that you’re running these campaigns, and you get a sale, how much did you spend on that sale compared to how much you made? So the situation, if we have a $20 olive oil sprayer, and I needed to get, let’s imagine five clicks at a dollar each. That costs me five dollars. And then that A cost is simply the five dollars, divided by the price of your product. That is a 25% A cost.
Now, people start worrying like, “Oh my gosh, I only have a 35% profit margin, but I just gave up 25% of it on these advertisements, and I only made a 10% profit.” That is true, but the beauty of running these campaigns, is that even though you’re making sales here. Every time you make a sale with an Amazon sponsored product sale, you actually are increasing your search ranking, and your sales ranking on your product, and you will get more organic sales, where people are just searching for your product, they’re not clicking on the ads, they’re clicking on your product in the normal search results, and you’ll start making more sales that way.
So, my whole point, to kind of bring it back to the question on how much you budget, spend for these initial campaigns. 10 to $20 is more than enough to start off with. You could actually spend more, because you don’t want to focus just on what you’re spending on the ads, you want to focus on your total overall sales. And every time that you get sales running ads, you will get organic sales that cost you nothing as well, and I always like to factor that in.
Oh, you’re muted buddy.
Rich Henderson: Do you know what’s really funny? I was actually clicking on the Facebook Live trying to unmute myself. So Joann asks, “I see you use broad match for the keywords. Is this better than phrase or exact?”
Mike McClary: Ah, okay. The answer is yes and no. There is no better or worse, it depends upon your strategy. So I didn’t go into the details on phrase, broad, and exact. Broad means that if I’m using a word like spatula, it means that words exists anywhere in their search. So, if you someone searches for, “The best silicone spatula,” you show up there. If they search for just, “Silicone spatula,” you show up there. Just as long as that word’s in there. So in general when it’s broad, you will get a lot more traffic, but that traffic isn’t as qualified. So you’ll get more visitors who are probably not looking for your exact product.
Phrase match means that if you put in like a two word phrase, as long as that phrase is anywhere in the search term, your ad will show up, your listing will show up there. And exact means, it only shows up for that exact phrase as well. They can’t have anything in front of it, or after it. My personal preference is a combination of all three. So, when I’m looking for ideas, let’s say that I really want to find out what people are looking for when they’re looking for spatulas. I will put a low bid in for a broad search term of spatula, and I’ll keep that low. Maybe 25 or 30 cents, and then once I start watching the data, even from these manual campaigns, I’ll see what people are searching for. And as I see what they’re searching for, I’ll put these other terms that I see them searching for, into a phrase match campaign.
And then once I see which ones of those are really working, then I get to the next step further, and I can actually put it into an exact match. And as I go down the progression from broad, to phrase, to exact, I can afford to spend more on each one of those, because I know that the more relevant traffic is coming in, in that order. Less relevant with broad, a little more relevant with phrase, and then the most relevant people looking for your product are an exact, so I can increase my spend on those. The answer is, I use all of them just like that, and I just control my bids knowing which type of match I’m looking for.
Rich Henderson: Cool, awesome answer. So I got a question from [Siddhant 00:35:43]. “How do we get to know as to which keywords are performing good with automatic bidding campaigns, and what is considered good?”
Mike McClary: All right, so when you look at the performance inside a [inaudible 00:35:56] right here for an automatic campaign, you won’t know. It’s kind of a mystery. They don’t show you what search terms your product’s showing up for, what’s being clicked on, or what people are buying. What you have to do is run a report, and they’re dead simple. You can actually have these run weekly automatically, which is what I do. So you run what’s called an, “Advertising search word report.” And each week I pull this down. I look at it, and that will tell you exactly for that automatic campaign, all the search terms that the customer has actually typed in, and for each one of those search terms, which one’s actually bought, and, which ones didn’t. Yeah, it’s the advertising search term report that will show you exactly what you’re looking for.
Rich Henderson: Yep, cool. I’m going to save your voice for a second here. This is actually one I can answer, Mike. This is not quite related to the training. But, “When adding keywords to the back-end, how many keywords can you add to each keyword line? There is only five lines.” So right now, like Amazon changed just about six months ago. You were only allowed 250 characters, so it’s not words, it’s characters, so that’s the number of letters. And, you can actually put them all on one line, you can split them up over the five lines. It doesn’t really matter, we’ve not seen any difference in doing that. But yeah, you’re restricted to 250 characters. It’s not unlimited. I mean before, we used to go up to thousands in there, and that’s no longer the case. You can only use 250. Let me jump to see if there’s anything else.
Okay, I’m not seeing anything related to this. There is one question here, I can answer it if you can’t. I’m pretty sure you can. “Is there any way I can do enhanced product listing?” I guess he means enhanced product content. “With trademark application number, instead of the registration number?” Do you want me to answer, or do you want to answer?
Mike McClary: No. Yep, yeah, I’ll take it. I know we both can answer it. The answer is no. You actually have to have it registered in order to do it. There’s a process involved. You need to trademark, it has to be registered and approved, not just applied for. I wish it were that case, and it used to be that way. It used to be at the previous version of brand register you could, but now you have to actually have it approved. What we’re seeing though, is trademark applications can be approved in as little as six months. It really does not have to be a drawn out process, as long as you really are applying for your own unique brand name.
Rich Henderson: Cool. Got another question from Carmen, which goes back to your earlier answer about looking at automated ads, looking at the actual keyword results. “Where can you find this? Run report weekly?” Or … I don’t know if you can show it, or just explain it.
Mike McClary: Yeah, I’ll go ahead and let’s actually go in and share my screen again. One second. Okay, so here I am, where we were just creating this campaign. Let’s just go right up to reports, and then advertising reports. And then it is the search term report right here. This is the report that’ll run and tell you exactly what people are searching for. All you gotta do is click on, “Request report,” and then it’ll run in real time, and you can also set it up to run weekly if you want to. So, it’s really, really easy. I have mine set up right now. Mine runs weekly, so I never have to worry about it. I just go in, and I download it. What I like to do is download this into Microsoft Excel. You can also put it into Google Sheets, because it looks like it’s a huge text file, and it’s really hard to look at it either in Word, or Notepad. Just paste it into Excel or Google Sheets, and it’ll be much easier to use. But yeah, that’s it, right there.
Rich Henderson: Perfect. Okay, I haven’t gotten any more questions. But Cindy, good old Cindy says, “Hi Mike and Rich, you guys are awesome.” She’s one of our FM members, so she’s completely biased. I’m not actually seeing any other questions Mike.
Mike McClary: Okay. That’s fine, you know what? That’s great, and we’re actually … I think we’re at the 40 minute mark, which is where we wanted to target today’s training. We knew what we wanted to get through today. We also wanted to remind you one last time. Again, if you enjoyed this training, it’s completely free training, we’re not selling anything on it. Be sure to check out the other Facebook Lives that we have. They’re right here, again, on the Amazing.com Facebook page. You’ll see them all under the videos tab.
Also, if you want to see more structured training, again, completely free. Go to AmazingSellingMachine.com, and then you’ll see our four part training series there, and then you’ll learn exactly how to source your product. You’ll get all kinds of cool downloads, like a list of 100 product … Hot product opportunities. A list of what categories are the best to sell in, and which one’s to stay away from. A list of the best countries to sell in, and if you might run into any more complications, like it may be a little harder for you to set up. We tell you which countries are the ones you might have to jump through a few other hoops to get through.
The second training, again, we talk about suppliers and freight forwarders. You get to download email templates. I didn’t mention that before. If you’re worried about how to email a supplier, we give you the exact email templates that we send to our suppliers, so you’ll know exactly how to sound professional. You’ll also get that recording of the freight forwarder, of our freight forwarder that we use to answer a lot of the question. And, what we call the, “Amazon automation blueprint.” So especially if you’re new joining this call right now, or if you’ve watched the other ones, you kind of want to see the big picture, how this all fits together. Download that blueprint. It’ll tell you … This like business in a box. All the steps of what you need to go through in order to start it. All the way from finding a product, to scaling the product later on.
Then the third training video covers launching and ranking, and we go through our rapid ranking system. How to launch your product, how to really easily do it. You’ll be amazed at how a simple advertising campaign, using a digital coupon, which we talked about here, and creating a Facebook offer, can boost your product’s initial sales greatly, and really jumpstart your sales.
And then the fourth one, we talk about a way to really put this all together, and make it happen much faster, and get involved with the community of other people selling just like you are. People like Rich and I, and Matt and Jason, and thousands of other people as well.
If you haven’t checked those out, I highly recommend that you do. Again, all of that is for free. Of course there’s things out there, you’ll have other offers out there to kind of jumpstart this process. But, even if you don’t want to spend a dime on anything, go get the free training. I highly recommend it. We’ve had lots of people come back six months and years later, and tell us they really loved the free training and they want to take it to the next level. But, get the free training. You will not regret it.
Rich has content in there, I have content in there, Matt and Jason have content in there. We have all kinds of videos out there. If you want to see real people, not saying Rich and I are not real people, but other real people who have started selling on Amazon and have just had some amazing life changing results, we have all kinds of real live testimonials there. When I watch them, I know Rich is the same way as me. We kind of get choked up seeing how many people’s lives have changed by simply starting their own eCommerce business on Amazon. And, we want to help as many people as possible live the same type of life that we do.
I’m going to leave it at that. Thanks so much for hopping on the Facebook Live. Have an awesome weekend. And then, one last thing. Next week we have at least four Facebook Lives coming up. On each one of those, we will have real live people that are going to share their stories. Some really heart warming stories, some huge incredible success stories, some unique stories, so absolutely come back next week. Like the page here, go sign up for the live sessions, check out our free training. Do everything, so that you can really watch us next week, and meet some people, and ask some questions.
You can hear it straight from them, what it was like for them. It’s not all roses, and unicorns sometimes. People have struggles. This is a real business you’re building for the rest of your life, and we’ll be open and honest about everything, about the pros and cons, and what it’s going to take to change your life and build your business. I’m going to leave it at that. Thanks so much for joining Rich and I. We hope you guys all have an awesome weekend, and I really look forward to seeing everyone next week. Thanks so much, and we’ll see you guys all soon.