Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Thursday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder Managing Director here at BWG Connect giant networking and knowledge sharing group we've been around for over six years now almost six years. Just intent on, you know, educating the digital space as a whole, or new close to 100, small format dinners this year, we tried to trim it back to 85. But I think the demand from the group was was massive. So it looks like we'll do close to 100. Again, just saw a bunch of people out at etail. West, that was a lot of fun. But if you want to know about future upcoming in person events, just ping us. We'll do probably 200 These webinars as well. And so today, you know, this, I don't think anybody's surprised, you know, kind of the topic for the day market aware advertising, how to leverage competitive and market intelligence to optimize your ad strategy. Franz, and I were just talking a little bit about it. It's this crazy space where we're all trying to optimize where we're at. Everybody's got ADD tech tools, strategies, plans. Now it's kind of the executional side, and how do you do it? How do you do it really, really well. It's kind of like the next level that we're getting to. And so with that, you know, Franz, or you want to do a brief intro on yourself and the organization. That'd be awesome. And if you have some slides, we're gonna jump through those. But again, if anybody if you have questions along the way, we do want these to be as educational as possible. So at any point time drop questions in the q&a drop questions in the chat or you can always email me Aaron@bwgconnect.com. So awesome. I'll kick it over to you.

Franz Jordan 1:47

Yeah, thank you, Aaron, for the intro, and hey, everyone excited to be here today in this with this group. My name is Franz Jordan. I am a general manager and VP at Perpetua a little background on myself. I co founded a software company called Sellics back in 2015. Sellics was one of the very first Amazon software companies back then we focus a lot on SEO. Over the years, we change our focus to the advertising side. So I've been in the let's say in the broader Amazon ecosystem for almost 10 years now and have been enjoying the developments in the Amazon space and the surge of advertising and all the things that go along with it. Sellics was then acquired about a year ago by Perpetua And so through this acquisition, I joined the Perpetua team and I am now managing a new business line within Perpetua, which is called PRISM, which is effectively a market intelligence product that is part of the Perpetua suite. For those of you who who haven't heard of Perpetua yet, Perpetua is building growth infrastructure for eCommerce, we have bit more than 250 people globally today. And we are building products that help brands and agencies grow them on marketplaces. Obviously, Amazon is a big one, but we also active on Instacart on Walmart on Target. And we focus very much on the advertising side. We don't do only advertising but we do a lot of advertising. And so we do this a lot for for brands, but we also work a lot with with agencies directly. And so that's that's the focus of Perpetua, I do hope that many of you have heard of have heard of Perpetua already.

Aaron Conant 3:32

That jobs in here Franz and Sellics are the OG and Amazon Ad Tech. Thanks, man. Yeah.

Franz Jordan 3:38

Oh, Matt is there as well. Hey, man, it's good to see you. So yeah, I mean, I've been around for some time. That's, that's certainly true. But the space is always moving, which I think is makes it very interesting. So so it's important to say, to stay up to speed. And so the topic that I brought today is is market away advertising and how you can leverage competitive and market intelligence data to drive advertising strategy. And so I've been I'm really trying to, to cover two sides today. On the one side, I was hoping to bring some new concepts and new ideas that maybe you haven't been familiar with so far. And then on the other side is always important for me to provide practical tips. So that ideally, after this webinar, they're like those 123 things that you can implement right away, go out and test and see how that drives value. So that's that's why you know, I want you guys to get out of this today. Now. Why? Why have Why am I choosing this topic of market aware advertising? What is even market away advertising? Let me spend a few minutes on giving you the context. I think if you look at how brands manage their Amazon business today, they focus very much on their own, on their own data and their own situation. So for any decision They change and whether they assess performance, they will typically just look at their own sales data and see I say is going upgrade, I say it's going down not great. When they set advertising goals, most users and advertisers that I speak to, they focus very much on their own data. Again, they say, Well, my margin is I don't know 20%. And after advertising, I want to have a 10% margin. So I'm gonna send on acres of 33%, and a row of Eros of free for instance. And when they then go and run advertising, they also again, focus very much on their inward view. And they say, Look, I just want to show up for a set of specific keywords that I think are relevant. So it's a very self centric view. And many decisions are driven out of your insight view. And so the point I want to make in this session today is not that this is wrong, I think you absolutely have to do that. Right, you cannot ignore your margins and your goals and your sales. But I think that the this is not enough. So I think specific on Amazon, because Amazon is probably the most competitive environment that you haven't eCommerce, your competition, and your market will have a massive impact on your performance. And you should therefore be considering the market and your competition as you make decisions and read, frankly, I think any decision that you're making, so you simply cannot leave out competitors, because competitors are everywhere, Amazon, if we just go through a few examples, and I'm sure you will all be familiar with this, right. But just to remind everyone, you go on Amazon, today, you're going to a product detail page, Amazon is literally placing a huge banner, very visibly above your product on the Detail page, right. And it's advertising this quite heavily with discounts, save and sales, and so on and so forth. You scroll down a little further, you will see a bunch of ads still above the fold, right? I mean, it's literally, it's literally under the buy box. So very visibly, again, a few more competitors. Scroll down a little further, you'll see another range of a bunch of competitors showing up right on your product detail page, scroll down a little further, you'll have direct comparison, your product versus a few other competitors in that market. Now, you scroll down further, again, more products and even down with the reviews, you will see competitor ads or competitor products showing up. I mean, it's literally just everywhere. And the the only place actually, it's quite quite amazing. The only place on Amazon where there are no competitors showing up is your Amazon brand store. But the thing with the brand store is that you will you know shoppers will see your products. But in order to buy the products, if they want to find more about the product, they will click on the Detail page again, where you know, they'll be exposed to the same the same list that I was just there was just clicking through. So I think Dr D, the point I want to make here is that when competition is always just one click away, your competition will have a significant impact on your performance. Okay, it's a little different on the store right on your store, you certainly have competition in order to get users to your store. But then once they're there, there is no, there's no more competition, because everything is about you on Amazon, because of the way that it's structured and the weight and the layout. And also, frankly speaking that philosophy, competition has a massive impact on your performance. So if we just take say in the drill example, let's assume that you're Black and Decker here, if DeWald, which is the best selling item here, you know, 40 foot 2000 ratings. 4.8 reviews are really, really, really strong product. If this product is going out of stock, this will have a massive impact on your on your sales, even though you haven't done anything, nothing has changed, right? And vice versa, if this product or if the world starts to advertise on your ASIN you will also feel this in a negative way. Right? And again, you haven't changed anything. It's just the market around you. That's changing, right? So market away advertising for me really means to be aware of the market as you're making marketing decisions. And I'm focusing on marketing today, but I think really any decision that you're making on Amazon and so those could be strategic decisions, but but but also small tactical decisions. Ideally, you would always take market and competition into account with any decision that you make. So, I assume that up until here, most of you will agree with me on what I said right? It kind of makes sense. Yes, we all know Amazon is a very competitive place. So the question or the the first thing we that you have to do if you want to take the market into consideration is that you will have to decide and to define what is actually your market. And that sounds like a very trivial question. But I've been speaking to many brands over the past couple of months as my in my new role here. And I can tell you that it's quite remarkable how everyone has a very different understanding and definition of the market. Even brands that are competing directly with one another, you will assume that they have the same understanding of the market. But even those words define the market in different ways. So, conceptually, the definition of the market is simple. When I sell drills, I'm in the drills market. But when you actually force yourself, to really define the market, by listing the products that you would include and listing the products that you would exclude from the market, you will need to make a few decisions that are not that straightforward anymore. Right? So do you include all dress or only dress within a certain price range? And if so, what is that price range? Do you include only cordless drills? Or do you include all dress? Do you include only specific brands? Or do you include all those brands? And those? You know, the answer to those questions is nuanced. It's hardly black and white, they say, Well, clearly, I should say, I should do it this way. And so it requires a good good level of understanding of your product in the industry, and also a good amount of thought to really doing this. So defining the market properly is the first step. And it's also a really important step. Because if the market becomes a key input for the decisions that you're taking, then having a wrong definition of the market will inevitably lead to wrong decisions. So defining the market as trivial as it sounds is actually more difficult and at the same time really important. And so while there is no, you know, definition that can give out and say like, okay, hey, this is this is the way you should do it. I just want to share a few thoughts and kind of like how I look at this. And the definition or how I define marketer. I think fundamentally, the, the right market is ultimately a group of ASINs that generates relevant sales volume and addresses the same shopper intent, right. So I put it on two on two dimensions. The first one is addressing shopper intent, obviously, competition typically is defined by those products that will fight for the same dollars. And so they're going after the same intent, that's not necessarily the same product, but it's going after the same intent. And then the other one is sales volume. So you want to have ASINs, or you want to have products that are selling your relatively, you know, they're selling quite a bit. Because if then if they're never selling, then obviously they're not taking away any dollars. And they basically don't matter in terms of in terms of competition. So the way that I look at it is what how do we how do we define those two axes? And how do we come up? Come up with this. And so, you know, the, the, if we go for the shopper intent first, you know, how can we really define at scale shopper intent? And how can we, how can we define it? The traditional approach, and this is when when I talk to most brands, this is how they were looking at it, they say, Well, you know, we just go by the categories. So they will say on Amazon, there are all those departments. So if I say power drills, I would go into tone tool and home improvements, I would then go into power tools and hand tools within power tools, I go into power drawers, and that's going to be my market and every ASIN, or every product in the market is, is going to be my competitor. And I think that while it's a an obvious approach, I actually think that this approach has a couple of drawbacks that are that are quite meaningful in in the day to day. So the first drawback, and that's the biggest one is that ASINs are often mis categorized. So brands typically don't care too much. And don't spend too much attention to the categorization of their of their products. Sometimes they will also fit into different categories, so they don't know exactly how to put it in there. And so it happens very frequently that the product is not in the category that you would expect it to be in. The second challenge is that categories are changing all the time. There are about 16,000 subcategories on Amazon, which is a lot. And you would assume that categories once said they're, they're fixed, but the reality is they change, they move between between the trees, they they disappear sometimes as well. So the categorization on Amazon is a lot more dynamic than anyone would think. And so that's that obviously creates problems because if you focus on one category, and then it moves around and changes the entire the entire dynamics. And then finally, you know, even if you ignore the first two problems, the reality is that most often the category itself is either too broad or too narrow. Okay, so within if you picked power tools, there may be products in there that you don't want to have in your competitive set. But if you go one level deeper, you say power core drills, then those might be too narrow and you may missing some. So, categories are just, I think are widely used today. But I don't think is necessarily the best, the best approach, because it doesn't really catch the products by by shopper need.

Aaron Conant 15:14

I mean, there's a lot of people miss categorizing on purpose, right? I mean, if you've got in one of these categories, you've got a million ASINs. And another one, you've got 25 You miss categorize on purpose. So you all of a sudden are the number one best seller and an adjacent category that most people aren't looking at. Right?

Franz Jordan 15:31

Browsing and hacking right.

Aaron Conant 15:34

Now that now that people do it, but just it's a possibility, right?

Franz Jordan 15:39

You heard of it? Right? Yeah, I started in some regions in the world tend to do this more than others.

Aaron Conant 15:47

That's the reality, this approach kind of what you're outlining, right, is, you're not, you might not even get them. Right. So

Franz Jordan 15:53

not so so. So that's, that's the issue. I mean, categories are just not particularly reliable for various reasons. And I think your browse on hacking is is is an intentional one, I do feel that it was a bit, Amazon got a bit better at cleaning this up. And a bit more restrictive at it. But it's it happens quite a lot. So I would definitely agree. Yeah. It is an issue.

Aaron Conant 16:18

Great. Just reminder, if anybody has any questions drop in the chat or the q&a, and we'll get them answered.

Franz Jordan 16:22

Now what is what is a different approach and approach I think is just more appropriate to the environment. I think the category approaches like a little bit of like old school, a bit coming from brick and mortar, IRI world. But I think when you look at Amazon, the advantage is that shoppers express their needs quite clearly by typing in keywords. Right. And this is this is basically the shopper intended to in a very direct way. Now Amazon on the other side, is investing a lot of money into building an algorithm that will show and rank their products, specifically. So that fits the needs that the shopper intends, the shopper expresses through the keyword. So the the simple logic, in my opinion is the following. If ASINs rank for a similar set of keywords, most likely they will all address the same need. Right. And I have this discussion with brands from time to time, specifically larger brands because they just come from this, let's say from the from the offline world. And so they think very much in categories. But you know, when you think about if two different products are ranking for the same keyword it is because ultimately shoppers are buying those two products after he searches keyword. So the example that I just had recently is baby carriers and baby slings, which are technically speaking two different products, but they both address the same needs, which is carrying around the baby. And so if you talk to the brand, they will say, Oh no, this is completely different. One is one is better for the back and this and that right? And so it's

Aaron Conant 17:58

it doesn't matter, right? I mean, I'm sure you have that conversation all the time. The competition is when you typed like you're saying the keyword what are the search results? Because that's what the algorithm is divining. When people type in this word, that's what they're most likely to buy. And therefore, you know, because you you, I talked to a lot of the big, you know, CPG companies as well. fashion companies, oh, they're not our competition. They don't they don't even compete. But they're a number one best seller on Amazon. Yeah, but we don't compete with them. Yeah. I don't know what land you live in. But it's, it's clear that

Franz Jordan 18:35

we must have the same conversations. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's just, I think, personally, I think it's, it's an outdated view. And I think it's a bit arrogant, because I think the reality is, you're you're competing with them, because people that spend money on those products could have spent that money on your products, and they're not doing it because they bought the other one, right. So I think that this is a, you know, it's a, it's a more, it's more aligned with with the sharper intent. Now, on the other side, you know, when you brands care a lot more about their product title than they care about their categories. So you will hardly see product titles that you know, of at least Freemasons are doing well that are not done well. And like John in a very thoughtful way. So typically, the keywords that you add to your title, they will also be meaningful to the product that you describe. So either going by the keywords, or by product at rank for the same keywords, or ASINs that have similar title and keywords and have an overlap there I think will lead to more meaningful results specifically in the in the context of in the context of Amazon. So this is how I would, I would approach this and it's a little bit of a different different view that I see in, in many organizations.

Aaron Conant 19:51

No, but I think it's a relevant one that people need to bring up. We're at a next level. That's why we're chatting about this right? It's gone beyond. Hey, I've got products on Amazon. I I updated my detail pages. I've got my you know, my brand store all of this stuff, it's, you know, I've got ad tech to help me out it is, what's the next level, we're in this this timeframe right now where everybody's trying to optimize strategically, what they're doing and the tools that they're using to do it with. And if there's some fundamental things, it's really funny, because it goes back to the fundamentals. If the fundamental things like this aren't done correctly, you can't execute correctly.

Franz Jordan 20:29

The way the way I see this is, if you look at the evolution of advertising, right, actually, when we started Sellics, advertising was in beta cell and it hardly existed, right, then advertising became more popular. And the first wave you could just basically run advertising was, it was so easy to make good returns, there it was, it was very simple, then it got more competitive. And so the next evolution was that Amazon would become more open when it comes to data. I mean, you may recall this in the early days, Amazon would only give you six weeks worth of history, and then why you didn't even have a date picker was just like six weeks. And that's it, or eight weeks. And so then Amazon at some point released all this data. And so today, we're in a stage where there's all this data, it's almost a bit too much data, because frankly, speaking, people don't really know how to digest all of this data, right. But all this data is always centered around yourself. And so I think that the next stage and the next evolution is going to be to incorporate what's happening around you into advertising strategy, right? I talked to this, talk about this, obviously, a bit a bit later as well, right. But if a competitor changes your prices, how does this affect your ad strategy? If a competitor goes out of stock? How does it affect your ad strategy? Right? So I think that's going to be the next. The next evolution once said, everyone has access to all their internal data. Awesome. Anyhow. So now, how can you how can you find this? How can you find the what's an easy way to detect this, I must feel like maybe I'm under estimating a bit, you know, the sophistication of the group here, I'm not sure if this is appropriate to show this year. But so I think a very simple way to do this right. Within Seller Central, there's a report called Amazon search terms. And it's actually I think, a very useful report. If y'all know about it, just tell me and then I'm going to skip over it. But it's effectively just shows you all the search terms by Amazon ranked by what he calls search frequency, so how often it's being searched. It's actually a funny one. So last week, the most searched search term was my orders. Classic, which is just I also heard the most searched keyword on Bing is actually Google. And so it's kind of the same, the same thing. So So what it does is it gives you all the keywords but what it also does, it shows you for each of those keywords, the number one click ASIN. And then it gives you a click share and an A conversion rate and gives you the top three essence per keyword. And so one of the things that I guess most people have heard of this report, but I think one simple but quite powerful trick others not utilized enough is you can actually search for ASINs in here. So you could enter an ace in here, just hit Apply. And then it will give you all the keywords that you know, we started from 2 million and went down to 21. Now, it will give you all the keywords where that ASIN that you search. So if you search for your own ASIN it will give you all the keywords that your ASIN is ranking for. But it also gives you all the all the other two ASINs per keyword ranking for so if you want to come up like the fastest way to come up with a set of relevant competitors literally just typing your ace in here, hit enter download, download and then take all the unique ASINs that are given here to you and those in the first three because all these ASINs were ranked for the same keywords that will generate a lot of traffic and a lot of conversions from it. And so it's a very simple and easy way to get started. So that's a that's on the on the on the shopper intent side. Now the second question is obviously Okay, say is right, and how how do I how can I estimate sales for an ASIN now the good thing is that on Amazon there's a pretty simple way to get a ballpark estimation for of for say of for sales for any for any ASIN really every ASIN on Amazon has a metric called the bestseller rank. And that bestseller rank effectively ranks any ASIN by unit sold within a category over a certain timeframe. So number one, best seller or product with bestseller rank one is the most selling item in the categories that are in two as the second lowest selling item in that category and so on and so forth. Now, when you sell on Amazon, which I assume most of you do, what you can do very quickly, very easily as you can just plot your own or the you know the numbers for your own essence in a chart. So you could say you know, let's say you have for products that you're selling, and so you will know that your top selling item has a does a rank of 10 is selling 250 units, second product has a BSR of 100, selling 100 units and so on and so forth, you kind of have those reference points. And so you could effectively just extrapolate this and draw a line and really assign a sales units to a rough approximation of how much any ASIN is selling based on the BSR. So if you know how much BSR 10 and 100 is selling, you will know that BSR 50, is going to be roughly 175 Insurance something units units. So Right. So by using the ref the BSR, for a few reference points, you can actually infer the sales for for for any, any other ASINs. This is you can actually get to rough estimates very quickly, literally, you just look at two or three products for which you know the size and then and then you can you can approximate it. This, those are some screenshots from the internet of things that we do, because your estimating says is one of the one of the things that we do. And so I just want to say that getting to like, you know, like a broad estimate is very easy. As I just said, if you want to get closer it gets complex, or the the effort increases meaningfully in a short time. So you run into complexities like this needs to be done every couple of hours because the BSR is updated every couple of hours. How much historical say is waded in into your BSR? If you're not the only one selling your ace, and right, so let's say you have a BSR of 100. And you're selling 80 units, but you also know that a bunch of other sellers. So how do you adjust for for this fact, right? How do you differentiate between an ASIN? That's going out of stock and an ace and that's just losing in popularity? Both? We'll see that BSR fall, right. And so the question is like, how do you? How do you account for this? So there are a bunch of complexities, that if you want to get, you know, closer your you will need to factor in. But depending on how exactly you want to have those estimates, if you just want to have a rough estimates, I think you're just taking your say as a as a reference point is is no, absolutely going to offer. Just a few like I thought about bringing some some things that you know, just quick things that may be helpful, right, for those of you that want to get a sense of, you know, the size and the velocity, here are a few categories. And then the daily units sold for different BSR different BSR ranges. And what I find quite interesting here is actually when you look at, when you look at the ratio between BSR 1000 to 10,000, you can see how concentrated sales are within a category, right? So you look at you look at baby, which has the highest concentration, so BSR 1000, is making 16 times more spending 16 times more units than VSR 10,000, which means that say is a very concentrated on the on the top end right on the top products. Whereas if you look at clothing, it's the fact is only about four. And if you think about it actually makes a lot of sense. Because clothing is something where you browse around a lot, you get inspired, there are so many different preferences and so on. And so it's you have a lot less this phenomenon of everyone buying the same product in a baby category. And I noticed firsthand because my wife is doing this quite a bit, we have two kids in the baby category. Typically you get a lot of recommendation from friends, you do some research. And so the moment you go to Amazon, you already have a pretty precise understanding of what you want. And it's specifically also the brand that you want right there. Like for each baby product, I feel it has like this one clear, dominant brand. And so people gravitate a lot towards those those brands and make sense because for your kid, you know, you want to have the trust. And so you know, I want to Best Buy the best and so on and so forth. Right? So it's a category where where you would browse around a lot less, right. And so yeah, I mean, this, this is just on the side here. As a general rule of thumb, once your once a BSR goes beyond 25,000. It's basically the product is is irrelevant, right? And it's actually quite remarkable. If you think about it, there are millions and millions of products in all those categories. And really, it's a top 10 to 20,000 Dead generate any meaningful sales. So there's so many ASINs on Amazon and it's just a genius business model of Amazon right to have all the seasons without paying for it. Anyhow, so to conclude on this part about like creating the right market and the baseline, what is the right size of your market? So if you create a if you think about a you know the market, how many ASINs would you add into this? My view is that there are two types of types of markets if you want to make very tactical decision means it's actually enough to just take the, you know, 510 20 direct competitors. Because if you start creating, let's say you have one ASIN, and you start adding 1000 competitors to it, you will get a lot of noise, and you will get very conscious, many contradicting signals about what to do, because there's so much going on. So if you want to make very tactical decisions, I recommend to create small markets and to think about in a very small, small way. Whereas if you create your if you want to go after strategic analysis, and do like broad analysis of markets, then you should create your hundreds 10 1000s, maybe even 10s of 1000s of of aces, right. So that's the first part. And so, you know, I think, why why did fears like basics? In my day today, I actually see the intricacies of getting the market, right. And I think I have an example later on what happens if you get the market wrong? Or how important that definition, that definition is, right? But so Okay, let's assume that you master this part, you know, this, have you dealt with it, you know, you know, you have created your market? You know, basically, you have your list of ASINs. Ready? Now, what do you do with it? Right? How do you actually make this into? How do you get value out of this. And so, there are so many different waysnto do it. But you know, I grouped them into into those four different buckets. The first one is any strategy to take sales away from your competitors. So there are different advertising strategies. And I'll get into those in a second, how you can specifically target competitors and go after their sales. The second one is you can use it to quantify the impact of advertising on and better get a better not a measure of what advertising really brings to you. The third one is everything around planning and budgeting. So you know, when when to run ads, how much budget you should have, and then, you know, fourth and last see performance reporting. So let's start we'll go through those four, I give a few examples for those four boxes, right. So let's start with taking sales from competitors. The probably the easiest, and most straightforward way to go after your competitor says is to run ASIN, targeting campaigns. So on Amazon, you can say, the standard, the standard way is to create a sponsor display campaign, which is one of the advertising formats that Amazon offers. And it allows you to target above the fold placements on any competitor detail page, right. So if you have listed on your competitors, you can just go ahead and create a a sponsored display campaign, target DOS and MB right there. It's also available for sponsored products and sponsored brands. But a dairy works a little different, it's actually confusing. It's not necessarily just targeting the detail page. It's also the other placements and so on. So I think sponsored display is really the main, the main thing here. And so the big advantage here, the question I get a lot is like, Oh, well, is it actually worth it? If I target the top selling item in the category? What are the odds of me, of me getting the clicks and is not really expensive. And so the advantage is that it's a CPC model. So you only pay when, when people are clicking. And so this was this was, you know, just so there's no risk in going after stronger competitors, there's basically just just upside down. Now, the second one is the second strategy. And I think this is a bit more, you know, a bit more advanced, actually, is to use DSP, and target shoppers who viewed competitors, but did not purchase it. Okay, so you can, with what I just said about sponsor display, you basically show up in the moment where the user is on the product detail page or the shopper is on the product detail page, right? So you have this direct moment where the you're basically a shopper can compare between your product, or your ad and then the product that they're on. Now, the advantage of this, this approach here is that you basically target the shoppers after they have left the product detail page again, right. So they showed interest, they were on that page, but then they basically moved on to some to some other place. And so you can retarget in there. And I think that this is one of the big advantages in doing this through DSP. Now a third strategy, and this is actually I think the personally, I think almost the most effective one is to target the top two top traffic keywords from competitors with a very aggressive top of search campaign. So obviously, you were first thing you want to do is you want to look, look up, you want to find the keywords that your competitors are ranking for support. I mean, typically you would have done this before already, right, but you can. One of the great things here of this report. I like it so much as you can just pick a company added a here that's ranking, then go back in here, get your keywords out again, right and just populate your keyword list very quickly. I mean, you guys will know, there are many, many ways that you can come up with with keywords and all these things, a million tools and so on, right. But I was, I tried to always show us a free way in these webinars, right so that, you know, there's a way there as well. Anyhow, so you identify the list of keywords, and then you just compare your organic rankings and wherever your competitors are ranking you. And where you have not exhausted your top of search, your top of search placements, you basically have an opportunity to be a lot more aggressive. Okay, so let's say for for this keyword here, for the last one sneakers, my competitor is ranking one, I'm ranking eight. So they are ranking me by seven ranks. And I'm doing zero top of search, right? So I can, I basically can do a lot two, by being very aggressive. So basically create a sponsored products campaign a put a very aggressive bid on top of search to outrank that competitor gets a as a way and and basically grow it grow my rankings, right. So that's, I think, you know,

Aaron Conant 36:10

it's interesting, because as complicated as it is, as much detail as it takes, this is what people are doing today. Right? So if you're looking to grow, you have to It's not like it was five years ago, and it will never go back to being that easy, right? Nicola bed, dime a bed. That was that was the beauty of Amazon, and not as many sellers. But you know, post pandemic here. Not only has the technology allowed people to jump in and be better at advertising, the overall strategy in the works, that's got to be put it on the front end to do it effectively, has gone through the roof. And we're just, we're, we're in a different time. That's what we are.

Franz Jordan 36:59

That's where the different time and that's I think, you know,

Aaron Conant 37:03

I feel bad for marketers, I really do. Like they have to fight for budget, not only do they have to constantly teach people upwards about what's going on, they're constantly trying to explain what it is, what the metrics and how they're making decisions, but at the same time, the art, the they're trying to perfect, keeps evolving. So they have to keep evolving and keep learning, which means they keep having to teach new things in an update ROI or, you know, KPIs that are wise, but KPIs. And then as soon as I get it done, it changes again, and it changes again, and it changes again,

Franz Jordan 37:41

it's a, it's tough, it's tough to I mean, I think just being up to date about all the changes and release that Amazon does, is almost like a full time job. Right? Let alone, experimenting with them and learning about them, and so on and so forth.

Aaron Conant 37:54

You know, in the absence of knowledge, people oversimplify and assume the worst. And so we have leaders and executive teams, who literally have no idea how digital was run still in marketing, digital marketing, the complexities behind it. I mean, it was over simplified, and you don't need more people. You know, there should be technology that solves this. Right?

Franz Jordan 38:16

Well, I mean, so I think you're the, the way I look at this, I mean, I think you're right, when you say well, you know, technically speaking, this is what people have been doing, you know, today messy, also over the past couple of years, like trying to build interest to show up at the top. The question now is like, what are you using as a reference point. And so so far, advertisers just bid, and they don't know when to stop? Because they don't know, what is the potential that I have for that specific keyword. And so I think if you have a good definition of your market, you will understand that for some keywords, you should stop when you reach the top, but there are other keywords where you should stop when you reach I don't rank 10 or so. Because realistically, you will never make it past rank. 10. Right. And so understanding this, and setting using your competitors as a reference point and be like, okay, you know,

Aaron Conant 39:03

made it more complicated.

Franz Jordan 39:07

Yeah, but I mean, it's like, I don't know

Aaron Conant 39:12

how it is, I get it, it's just, you just highlighted another thing is, you know, for each one of this methodologies, the land of diminishing returns is at a different point for where that, where that ASIN ends up. And the overall possibility based on each one of the different advertising segments could in the overall lat land of diminishing returns, we'll hit a different point. And therefore you have to be watching. You have to be monitoring and controlling all of those or you're wasting money, which is what nobody wants to be doing right now.

Franz Jordan 39:45

That no nowhere nowhere is the peak right and don't try to go beyond the peak because that's just wasting money. Right? So that's basically where it starts. You're exactly right. That's so

Aaron Conant 39:55

you make a great point, which is like it a lot of hobbyists mind is is, you know, the peak is always the, you know, number one bestseller, like number one search ranking, maybe maybe not right, you might not ever be able to get there with certain, you know, advertising placements and others you might be able to.

Franz Jordan 40:15

And so making that being able to make that difference, I think requires to take the market into into consideration because that will depend on the market, but then the market is also changing. So maybe what is not achievable, achievable today will be achievable tomorrow, and vice versa. Right. Yeah. So you're,

Aaron Conant 40:31

so we're doing we're gonna reach out after we're going to do actually a whole podcast on this exact thing as well. Yeah. Okay. Because I don't want to take away I know, there's more slides, I want to make sure we get to those.

Franz Jordan 40:46

I mean, it's okay. I mean, so just just, I'm just gonna go through this fairly quickly. Right. quantifying the impact of advertising, I think this is also something does that is really, you know, obviously really important and specific in a time where you have to justify every dollar that you spend, right, and you want to understand we are how's it how's it driving return? And so I think, you know, the best way to do this is actually to track to track market share. Right? So how are your essay is developing relative to the other folks that you're competing with? to then be able to, to then be able to, to properly assess this? Right. So one of the key questions, or one of the big questions that we get asked all the time as Perpetua is, what should I set as a right? Target A cos, right, or target Ross? Like, and if I increase it? Or if I decrease it, what will happen? Right? And so today, there, it's, it's kind of hard to really measure the impact of this, because you say, Well, okay, I'm going to increase it, and then you make more sales. But well, you know, did you actually grow your share as well, or just just everyone made more in it in that time, right. And so I think, being able to overlay this and see like, Okay, how not just how does it impact sales? But how does it impact your sales relative to the others around you? Which is your market share? Right? It's just say market share another way, I think this is just is becoming increasingly important to assess performance of advertising and the quality of advertising, right? So changing your target equals what happens to your share, changing your budget, right? You double your budget, what happens? Like are you doubling your share as well? Or is your share staying the same? And you're just spending more to get the same out of it? Right? So yeah, I think those are, those are really important. You know, adding, just taking notes, it's awesome. So then, your fourth, or the 30 are area planning and budgeting, right. So this is, this is actually a, if you have your market well defined, right, and you try call your market is evolving, and you can see sales volumes and so on, you can actually see certain seasonality. And so this is actually a real example. This is from body scales, right. So to measure your weight. And so you will see this is basically September until until February, right? So basically the last six months or so. And so what you'll see is you'll see a peak here around Prime Day, which was in October, you'll see a peak here on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, those two weeks here, but that was really interesting as I get the sales go down as with most products, but then after, after, after Christmas, they go up again, almost to the same level as Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Why? Why because people you know, they have good New Year's with

Aaron Conant 43:29

New year, new you New Year. Exactly right marketing campaign used forever.

Franz Jordan 43:35

It's it's a it's a it's a it's a huge, there's a huge boost here. Now, when you actually compare this so the upper chart is the same that I just had on the page before. And now you overlay this with a with, you know, how the individual brands were doing in this market, you could actually see that one brand here were things was making a killing. And that season, right and was really growing says, whereas courthouse, they probably are not even aware that there is a season because they don't see it in essays, right. So they just they would assume like Okay, y'all think it's just it just normally. So understanding the broader market trends, both for seasonality and then and then for budgeting reasons, right? If your market is growing by 20%, on average, like your budget should also grow by 20%. Like that's, you know, that's a simple logic, but I think you're specifically for internal discussions, sometimes some simple logics can actually be very, very powerful. And then so just just the last one one more minute on this one, I think, you know, market share and comparing yourself to the market is not just important for advertising, it's important for everything like you know, a bunch of conversation they have these days with with teams as they say, Hey, my says I'm not developing as we as we expected, you know, we're behind plan. And so the question is always why is that right? Is it me or is it the market? And so if you just look at say, so right now, this line here, the blue line is just my say is typically on You know, when someone sees that line, they get a heart attack. And they will say like, oh, you're doing a bad job. And you know, sales are going down a tanking, it's all terrible and everything. Now, you add a second line to it, you add your market share, and it puts that it puts it says you've opened a completely new context, right? And suddenly, you realize, well, actually, my market share is stable. Sales are down. So the overall market is down, which is not great. But it's not me underperforming, it's actually me performing in in the market, right. So

Aaron Conant 45:27

I think, I mean, this is a line that everybody wants to see. Right to explain to executives, again, to explain to leadership, hey, by the way, we're down, but everybody's down. And therefore, it's not because we're doing anything wrong. It just might be fewer shoppers, or the wrong time of the year or or

Franz Jordan 45:46

that is literally I think this is the charge edge that resolved the takes away this question of like, is it me? Or is it the market? Right? And so yeah, I completely agree. I mean, this is this is kind of how you want to,

Aaron Conant 45:57

if not, then you see this when the markets down? If you don't have this aquamarine line, green line, I guess. Then you start making different decisions. Right? Well, I got to do more paid media, maybe I got to target my competition. You're you make the wrong assumptions. Again, in the absence of knowledge, if you oversimplify and you assume the worst, oh, my market, my biggest competitor is taking all of us, they must be way up, they must be way up, let's go do XYZ advertising campaign to campaign to conquest them when it's just spending more money? It's irrelevant, because everybody's doing the same.

Franz Jordan 46:37

And, or you let you fire agency, because you say your agency is doing a bad job, actually, was no reason to fire them? Right. So

Aaron Conant 46:46

I'd say not only every brand, but yeah, every agency should have this right. And they're backed by

Franz Jordan 46:51

basically people that are being held accountable for for performance, right. And performance be measured in sales, which is how most people measure performance on Amazon. Right. So yeah, I think that, you know, this is this just helpful. And so just, you know, to come back to, to what I said before, like this is that this is actually kind of a case study. This is, you know, the, the same brand tracking market share, once in the market with all the digital body scales, and once in the market, just with scales itself amount of $50, because they actually a premium provider, right. And so you can see how it kind of changes the picture. I mean, it's not super drastic, but you can kind of see one is going down, the other one is actually flat. And now the question is what happened here on the, on those two weeks. And so you know, quite interestingly on that, on that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we there's just as kind of No, no name brand that's coming out of nowhere, we typically you have like 40 50% of the market. So you complete the dominated market. But on that specific Black Friday, Cyber Monday, this small brand was just so aggressive and went from 2% to 12% in that period, because they just were extremely aggressive and coming coming after you. All right. So next year, probably there'll be aware of this, that this may be an opportunity. And it's actually something I see a lot, right, those peak events being used by smaller brands to go after bigger ones. So yeah, maybe maybe use this or be aware of this, right and have a have a defense strategy ready for this all So anyhow,

Aaron Conant 48:20

I see. It's funny, because when everything's going great, everything's great. But as soon as one acent starts to do a downturn, everybody wants to do the huge investigation into what's going on. Explain to us what's you know, anyways? Yeah, it's just, it's too funny. Again, I feel bad for marketers, digital marketers.

Franz Jordan 48:38

Wow. Yeah. I mean, look, on the bright side. The equipment of digital marketers also getting better, right? I mean, you have better tools and better education, and so on and so forth. Right. So, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's certainly be been more difficult.

Aaron Conant 48:59

What are the things that you're most excited about? That's coming down the pipe. We know we're chatting a little bit on the on the marketing cloud piece. We'd love to hear a little bit on that as a whole. Others if you have questions, drop them in the chat or the q&a. This we had about, I don't know. 434 minutes, five minutes left here? Well,

Franz Jordan 49:18

look, I think AMC is really, you know, again, if you put it in a certain context, like Amazon started with sponsored products, and then over time, they rolled out all those all those different advertising formats, and so people are gradually adopting them. And you know, I think right now we're in a good position to assess performance of the individual advertising formats. But what's really hard is to understand how do they play together? Right, right. How Does sponsor brands and products and display and DSP and how do they all affect one another? And so I think AMC the Amazon Marketing Cloud, is that piece of a puzzle that gets the thing that brings everything together?

Aaron Conant 49:53

Are people using it because it burst onto the scene. Everyone's like, oh my gosh, it's gonna be amazing. And then it's just Really quieted down as people try to figure it out. So how should people be looking at it? And how should they be the using it? Or how are you guys using it? Like, is it more leverage towards, you know, service providers, you know, tech companies that can crunch it or is.

Franz Jordan 50:15

So I think you need to have the, you need to have access to capabilities like you typically need to I mean, even to use it, you need to be able to write SQL queries, right, which is not something everyone can do. So typically, you need to have a team that's large enough and equipped enough to do that, which would be, you know, a larger brand, or you have a service provider, agency or tool or so they can, they can kind of process it for you. Right. So the way that we offer the Perpetua is we have a few standard reports that many people use, specifically around the impact of DSP. But then, if people have custom questions, we basically, we ask them what they want to find it, we have to find out what they want to find out, and then we go and find it out for them. Right, and provide the report that will give them the answer to that question. Because, yeah, otherwise, it's you're right. I mean, it's quite difficult to it's quite difficult to navigate. But, you know, eight years ago, the console didn't even have a chart, right? It was literally just a table. So yeah, it's not going to take another eight years. But in two, three years, like Rest assured, AMC is going to get a lot more accessible, like through service providers, but it's also from Amazon themselves. I'm very convinced of this. So yeah, but today, it's tougher.

Aaron Conant 51:25

Yeah. And that's where I just said, brands super interested and all this fanfare. And yet, like I don't, what do I What do I do with it? Do I have access to it? How do I utilize it, or you know, all the capabilities, because everybody was really, really excited about it. But at the end of the day, if you don't know how it's just another data stream that Amazon has, that you may or may not have access,

Franz Jordan 51:50

we're going from a period of not having enough data to having too much data. And so now it's about making sense of the data. And so, yeah, I think it's a different challenge. Yeah.

Aaron Conant 52:01

Yeah, it is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All of a sudden went from a data lake to a data ocean. Just, we have more to play around with. I, well, I don't have any other questions that came in. And we do like to always wrap these up a little bit early, give everybody a chance to get back to them on to the next meeting without being late. With that, you know, Franz again, hey, thanks so much. for your time today. You guys are great friends, partners, supporters, the network and a ton of organizations in it. So we really, really appreciate you carving out some time today. If anybody like a follow up conversation with Franz or anybody over at the Perpetua team, they're all around great partners and leaders in the space ton of different organizations, like I said, in the, in the network, using them more than happy to make those connections. Also, look for follow up email for me, I'd love to have a conversation with you. I'd love to just catch up, see how things are going and pick your brain out and what are the newest strategies that are out there. Of course, if anybody needs help with service provider selection, that's what we're here for. And with that, we're gonna wrap this up. Thanks again for your time today. Thanks, everybody for alrighty, see you my Franz. Take care