Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Thursday, everybody, my name is Aaron Conant, I'm the co founder, Managing Director here at BWG Connect, a networking knowledge sharing group of 1000s of brands. We kicked this thing off six years ago to kind of fill that gap of, hey, how do I get education? How do I connect with other brands? How do I stay on top of newest trends, strategies, pain points that are shaping digital without having to travel to a conference, and or, you know, pay for a ticket to get a bunch of sales pitches. And so we're gonna do close to 100 in person events this year, small format dinners across the US, if you're in a tier one city, let us know, we would love to invite you to one of those. We're gonna do close to I don't know, 250 300 webinars as well. So encourage you to let us if you're not on the mailing list, just let us know, we send out a monthly that just says hey, here's everything that's upcoming, I spend the majority of my time talking to brands, just helping them with overall digital strategy is usually somewhere between 20 and 30. Each week, I would love to have a conversation with anybody on the line today, just to kind of network knowledge share. And I'd love to pick your brain on Hey, what strategies are working, what aren't, I can share across the board. But also, Hey, who are the top service providers that are out there, we're helping a ton of people out with service provider selection. So don't ever hesitate to reach out. And as we kick this off today, we're starting a few minutes after the hour. And just so everybody knows, we're going to we're going to wrap this up before the end of this hour as well. And so, you know, before 230, Eastern Time, it'll all be wrapped up. And so I want to kick off this topic, the power of full funnel advertising on Amazon from the standpoint of as Josh and I were just talking about, everything's gotten a lot more complicated than it was, you know, just even a few years ago, huge rise in DSP. You know, a push into video reviews and offsite, display ads, everything and it's just so much more complicated than just traditional PPC. And so, Jonathan, Perpetua, great friends, partners, supporters, the network for years now, just done a ton of educational sessions with us, and so really appreciate you But John, I'll kick it over to you. If you want to do a brief intro on yourself Perpetual that'd be awesome. And then we can start to jump into a little bit of content sound good?

Jonathan Chung 2:38

Yeah. Sounds great. Hey, everyone. My name is Jonathan. I'm a data strategist here at Perpetua. I support a lot of our larger brands and agency partners, looking for ways to grow on Amazon and other marketplaces. So for those who aren't familiar, Perpetua is an ad automation platform. We help people manage their ads through bid optimization and a number of intelligence tools. Today, we'll be going through basically, what's what can we look at in terms of the upper funnel? I know a lot of people are familiar with sponsored product ads. And maybe some of you have dabbled with sponsored brands sponsored display. But how much farther? Can we push those ad units? And where can we start to expand beyond sponsored ads. And I think there's a lot of potential and a lot of this has come up more recently, over the past few years. And sessions like this can be helpful to make sure that you're staying on top of the game, and keeping your ears open for what else is coming out.

Aaron Conant 3:28

Awesome. And just to that note, another thing is we'd like this to be as educational and informational as possible. So as you're sitting on the line today, if you have any questions, drop them into the chat, drop them into the q&a, we're going to get those answered real time. And so if it's easier, you can always email them to me, Aaron Aaro, n at bwgconnect.com, or drop chat q&a, whichever is easiest for you. We'll try to answer all of those real time. Awesome. Well, let's jump into the content. And we'll just handle questions as they pop up. Sounds good.

Jonathan Chung 3:57

Sounds great. So I think let's go over the funnel. First. I think a lot of people might be familiar with the bottom half of this looking at sponsored ads, as shoppers are on Amazon, in the purchase intent stage. What's the experience like and what is that final purchase that they're making? Making sure that you're addressing with multiple ad units, sponsored products, brands, and display is very important. But beyond that, where else can we look? Right? So editorials are some that Amazon has been dabbling around with the past few years, these have on site and now it's primarily just off site editorials. Still, these are a great way to drive traffic to Amazon. Once you feel that you've captured your reach there. This can be a great way as well for any type of highly researched category. I know a lot of sellers and brands are going to be in that space and this can be a great way to build trust for your brand. Going a little further up the funnel driving into awareness. Both influencers and DSP are great options, I think was slightly different strategies as well. And trying to understand which is the best option for you. Maybe a combination of the two is really going to be what we're driving into today. So exactly what AR what is influencer marketing? And how can I start leveraging that as a brand or a seller on Amazon? Or if I'm an agency? Does it make sense for me to start bringing this to my brands, right? If this is something that I can offer that maybe others aren't, perhaps this is a tool in my arsenal that we need to add. And lastly, with DSP, we'll dive into some of the more granular control that we have there. I know this is an option that people typically look at a little bit later on. But it can be a tool as you're looking to expand, you know, how can I get much more granularity and control in my advertising, and that's where this really steps up. So I think it's safe to skip over sponsored products, I think most of us are familiar with that very bottom of the funnel. But sponsored brands, if you haven't quite dabbled into it yet, it's a great way Like the name suggests to build your brand. Right? You can take up a lot of placements on the top of search results page, increase in your share of voice. And what we're finding is that establishing so much Share of Voice on the front page can be a great way to really attract a lot of new shoppers, and to build that trust. So what we're seeing is new to brand rates on sponsored brand ads are significantly higher than sponsored products. Right? If you're looking for specifically to capture new to brand is is a great ad unit.

Aaron Conant 6:29

Are you seeing brands use all of these? Or are you seeing brands test and learn all of them? And then end up actually only doing one or two? Or is this like the new normal, like doing all four?

Jonathan Chung 6:41

I would say we typically see great success was success with brands using a combination of placements and ad units. In terms of sponsored brands, we're looking at video store spotlight, product selection, or custom image, we generally recommend doing some AV testing to find out what works and what resonates most with the brand and their shoppers. Obviously, you might see some variants between brands, but the only way to find it will be detested to learn for yourself. Nine. Yeah.

Aaron Conant 7:10

I mean, it makes sense. It just keeps getting more complicated. So awesome. Just to remind others, you have questions on any of this stuff. Feel free to drop in the chat or the q&a.

Jonathan Chung 7:21

Yep. We'll go over the sponsor display. And I think where a lot of people might already be using sponsored display is for a defensive strategy on your own PDPs, making sure that your competitors aren't taking up that ad space. Right. And this is great, we don't see incredibly high CPCs. For that, click throughs honestly, not super high compared to other ad units, which is great. So if you don't want to overspend on brand defense, it can be just a way to shove out your competitors from owning that ad space on your product page. I think beyond that, what's important to note is that there are much more complex strategies you can run with sponsored display. One that I want to touch on briefly today is how you might want to use this for some type of competitor conquesting. Right, you know that you can target a bucket of your competitors on Amazon. But you might actually see greater results in narrowing down and targeting a single or small collection of ASINs from competitors. Either one where you can, you know, a have a comparable product. and B make sure you're winning on price reviews, or ratings. pairing that with a coupon can be even more powerful to steal traffic away from your competitors PDPs doing this on, you know, high traffic days, let's say Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Amazon Prime Day can be incredibly effective, especially if there's increased traffic on those days. Right. And you might be wondering, you know, how do I pick an ace and to target which of my competitors should I be going after? Really, I'd look at two criteria, like number one where you do have that comparable product that we can win on some of these metrics, either price review, count and rating, or to look at your competitors that are actually dominated at the top of search or have higher organic ranking, right, they're paying for that placement, or they've already built up that organic rank. When they're capturing those clicks from shoppers, you can piggyback off of that higher organic rank or on top of search placement and exists on their product page. It can be a great way to funnel away traffic from your competitors over to your product page.

Aaron Conant 9:24

In this case, like off Amazon sponsored display set. How is that different from like DSP and I know we're gonna get into DSP, but is the offsite Amazon placements.

Jonathan Chung 9:37

A lot of the placements are actually shared with DSP. So you can achieve very similar placements both on and off. Amazon was sponsored display and with DSP, I think one of the main differences and one of the main benefits of DSP is that the targeting is so much more granular. Right? You can have a lot of you know, CPC targeting with this display, you can have some behavioral targeting as well. But you can't get super, super granular the same way that you can get a sponsored display. And I can provide some more examples, but sorry, as granular as DSP. And when we get there, I can provide some examples of how you might want to get a little bit more fine tune with your DSP advertising.

Aaron Conant 10:20

Yeah, I mean, that's going to be great, because what I've seen just in talking to brands, you know, is this huge shift where you can get so much granular, right? It's almost like, Can I turn DSP into bottom funnel as well? Is top. But are there levers to pull where I can get this to actually be bottom funnel? Because I can be absolutely so targeted and everything that I'm doing? Yeah, my cost a little more. But hey, if conversion rate is higher, right, at the end of the day, I can get a higher row. So

Jonathan Chung 10:50

Exactly, exactly. I think that's the idea there. But we will get to that in the DSP.

Aaron Conant 10:55

Okay, but they do. I mean, if we talked a little bit about the, you know, what your competition is doing, which I mean, everybody has to be cognizant of. So if you see the sponsor display off site, it's the same inventory as DSP. Or the same placement, I should say, that same inventory. Yeah, but the same placement.

Jonathan Chung 11:16

Yeah, a lot of the same placements off Amazon. So it's still Amazon own ad space. You do gain access to that with sponsored display. But there can be more control with DSP. And there's some ad units with DSP, where you might not get access to with sponsored display.

Aaron Conant 11:37

Awesome. Awesome. Look, he's on Twitch here, like, how often is this blowing up is this, I don't know how often people are doing sponsored display on Twitch.

Jonathan Chung 11:46

Honestly, I would say that it's very dependent on the category that brands exist in, we find that if you are in the tech space, or if you're targeting audiences, that would typically line up with a persona of a very popular Twitch user, perhaps that might be an indicator that you should be advertising on Twitch. So if you work with, let's say, any type of computer hardware company, keyboards, mice, you do quite well with those, you know, the gaming enthusiast communities. Awesome. Love it. Well, I do want to chat about editorials. So some of you might have had some experience with onsite editorials before Amazon's kind of killed that program. When we looked into the data, we actually found that the majority of sales were being driven by offset editorials anyway, so it isn't actually a huge change in terms of the types of return that people can see from these types of placements. Now, there's a number of different options that you have, when you're dealing with publishers, we often see Multi Product Reviews, where your product will be mixed in with a number of other competitors. Typically, you're going to be maintaining this best overall spot, highlighting your product above the competitors as a great comparison tool. Single Product reviews are a great way to showcase an individual product, in this case, you won't be shown alongside your competitors. It's meant just to highlight an individual product. And lastly, a brand view can be a great way to start building that brand presence for people who aren't as familiar with your brand yet. Maybe there's a collection of products that you want to showcase all at the same time. A brand review ideal for that type of editorial.

Aaron Conant 13:23

Now be quick. I don't know if we can do this. Well, here's a bread and thanks for sending this in. It'd be cool to do a quick poll to I'll do this next round. How many people are using off site editorials? But Breton types in here? Have you seen any except success in brands using display to target competitors off site of Amazon? Only the competitor products have none or limited presence on Amazon.

Jonathan Chung 13:46

So targeting offset only for sponsored display?

Aaron Conant 13:49

Yeah, I mean, yeah. Have you seen any success in brand? Yes. Yep.

Jonathan Chung 13:55

Yeah. In general, I would probably tend to push users towards DSP. In that case. I know if you're trying to get more granular with where you're appearing, and the types of users you're trying to attract. And it sounds like that's what you're trying to do with specifically ignoring onside Amazon placements. You do get much more control with DSP. So if you're looking to build a very fine strategy and very granular strategy, that's when I would start pushing you towards DSP over sponsored display.

Aaron Conant 14:26

Awesome. Nice. Exactly. Perfect. And others. If you have questions, drop in the chat during the q&a, but also and we're not going to, you know, jump out to anybody but if you want to raise your hand, like how many people are using off site editorials today, if you can just raise your hand again, we're not going to jump out to anybody, but would just like to see here.

Jonathan Chung 14:46

Yeah, also add here that the off site editorials, they're extremely useful for highly researched products and categories, right. So we see skincare health and beauty, art supplies to a certain extent Being very popular for this category. I think tech will also do well here, if people are looking at comparing different options, let's say for headphones or for other computer accessories, right? This can be a great way to showcase your product against your competitors. And really, you know, communicate with your customers about what a Why is my product, the one that you should be choosing? What are the pros and cons. And it provides much more detailed information for consumers to work with.

Aaron Conant 15:26

Very interesting, we only had one person raise their hand, like, how strategic is this? Should we are you would you say to the other 27 here, like, do this?

Jonathan Chung 15:36

Yeah, I would say, I mean, to be candid, I don't know if editorials are for everyone. Right? I think it makes a lot of sense. If your product is going to be one that's highly researched in a category where there are other competitors that are being considered. If you have a very low consideration item that might be more of an impulse purchase. Perhaps editorials aren't the best option for you. Awesome. Love it. Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's move on. So influencer is a big one. So we're starting to move a little bit higher up the funnel out of consideration more into awareness. Now. Now, a lot of brands are advertising online, through social media partnering with influencers, both at the micro and macro level, they will have different benefits to that, quite obviously working with macro influencers, millions of followers, huge, huge reach micro influencers, not as great of a reach. But on the flip side, we do tend to see that working with them does come at a bit of a lower cost. And we generally see relatively higher engagement with micro influencers who have a strong smaller but more loyal following. So if you're looking for that engagement, and taking the next step, and really pushing something to consumers, micro influencers might be a great cost effective way to get that engagement with enthusiast communities.

Aaron Conant 17:05

This is something you're doing within the Perpetual platform.

Jonathan Chung 17:08

Exactly. So we can help connect advertisers with influencers, micro or macro. And you'll be able to, I mean, the idea here, number one outside of just awareness, is being able to build a brand recognition and trust, right, when an endorsement for a specific product comes from an influencer, that a shopper follows, it instantly resonates much more with them than having seen this in let's say, a sponsored display advertisement online, where it's just the product sitting in the sidebar, or in you know, mixed in with other ad placements, right.

Aaron Conant 17:43

I mean, we seen, you know, Amazon, the value they place on outside traffic off Amazon off site coming to Amazon and making a purchase. And the impact of that on organic search rank is huge, right? I mean, this is something new product launches, whatever you want to do like this. What I've seen just in talking to brands is the importance of this is incredibly high.

Jonathan Chung 18:10

Influencer is going to be a huge opportunity for a lot of brands that aren't already investing in influencer marketing. What we're seeing as well as seek C's are incredibly low for influencer marketing, on average. So for those that aren't familiar with Spark ads, you can also promote your products as they're appearing in videos. So it's not just the influencer, creating a post or a video online for viewers to interact with, we're able to promote that content and push that to more of an audience. We're seeing CPC is in the ballpark of 50 cents to 75 cents, which is great for off site traffic being driven to Amazon.

Aaron Conant 18:56

Yeah, I mean, the conversion rate is higher once they land on the product because of you know.

Jonathan Chung 19:02

Exactly but not going and

Aaron Conant 19:05

This was taken place, right. And so all of a sudden, you get this off site traffic to your detail page that Amazon's now really valuing, oh, by the way, that person is more likely to convert because they're coming over from an influence channel. And then the higher the conversion rate, in tandem with that off site traffic, it just I mean, we Yeah, and just talking to brands using stuff like this, like even have a, you know, existing products that have been on the platform for a year. Right actually make it the page one hits.

Jonathan Chung 19:35

Yeah. There's something that changes a lot once you step beyond Amazon advertising, right? There is the Amazon or ad space and that's great. But the games that you're making, are not linear and they're not infinite. Eventually after you scale to a certain point, obviously your returns become less and less efficient. As you grow. That's we all know that Looking at other types of advertising options to start getting traffic to start shopping, to start shuttling other shoppers to Amazon can be a great way to sort of surpass that cap once you've gotten to that point on Amazon. Awesome. Yeah. Something else that's cool about this is that brands get the full usage rights to the content that's graded. So you can use this on your website, and other promotions. It's not just there for the content creator. The brand gets access to the usage rights as well. That's a very important piece. Awesome. Now, DSP sponsor display. What exactly can we be doing differently with DSP?

Aaron Conant 20:50

Yeah. Really quick, just a question gets dropped in here. Are there any concerns with investing in ads on Tik Tok? I thought I saw they recently announced plans to shut off links sending traffic to outside sites and attempt to keep users shopping on their own platform to shop. I guess tick tock does want you to stay there, right.

Jonathan Chung 21:12

Yeah, there were some concerns about that. I think there still is a it doesn't affect the entire benefit that you receive from influencer marketing. But it can affect perhaps maybe the attribution of this, right? If you're no longer using affiliate links, using that attribute sales, understanding other ways to track the success of these campaigns, I think is going to be crucial. Just doubling back to influencer marketing here. So you'll still have access to the content itself, you'll be able to track impressions engagement with this type of advertising. If sales aren't being attributed through the affiliate links anymore, what we actually do notice as well, is a bit of Brand Lift coming from influencer marketing, right. So once people are being shown that these promotional videos through Instagram or through tick tock branded search tends to increase on Amazon as well. Right. And now you're no longer appearing in a category search against your competitors where the CPCs are higher. If a lot of that traffic is being redirected to a branded search, with lower CPCs, and higher conversion rates, that could have a great impact on the amount that you're able to capture from this reach while trying to limit the exposure to your competitors. Awesome. Great. Now diving into DSP, we did mentioned before that you can get more granular with your audience targeting. So what does that really mean? Right? Am I going after someone who hasn't purchased my product in 30 days, or who has seen my product, you can get way more granular than that. So looking at user demographics, looking at geography, understanding that I could target certain areas of the United States that I wanted to ride shoppers coming from certain states, I could target customers of a certain gender, age income bracket, and really refine my searches that way, I really refined my advertising that way. And I can also pair that with shopper behavior. Right. So if I specifically want to target new brand customers, shoppers who haven't purchased my product before, I can target only new brand customers with a certain campaign. That's huge for some advertisers. Now, the other thing that is really helpful with this is that because the targeting is so much more granular, you can remove a lot of the impressions that would have otherwise been wasted with sponsored display. Right? If I have no specific product, let's say it's a women's razor, but a lot of people on Amazon are just searching for razors. If I can eliminate an entire demographic from my advertising, it's huge. I'm no longer having to compete in those auctions and no longer wasting my clicks on some of the shoppers that are not intended as my audience. Right? You can go even more granular, right? If I have a product, maybe it's a newer tech product, I'm trying to target a demographic that's younger than the age of 25. Maybe my demographic skews male. Maybe this isn't released globally. I have a number of different marketplaces. I mean, I want to target just the US. Right? This can be huge for that. And going I'll go a bit more into the geographic targeting as well. Specifically throughout the year, you might notice that user purchasing behavior change is suppose I sell pool accessories. And I noticed that my sales are highest in the summer, they taper off in the winter. But they don't taper off evenly throughout the states. Right? The northern most states are going to see a decline first before they sell their most states. And if I'm deciding to scale back my advertising, I can do that on a state by state basis to make sure I'm still targeting users who I want to show my ads to where it's still relevant for them. Right? This is a total game changer. So you're no longer having inefficient spend where you don't need to be having that stead.

Aaron Conant 25:39

So quick question comes in, how difficult is it for a brand new DSP ads on their own?

Jonathan Chung 25:45

If a brand, so DSP is fairly granular to set up, there are a lot of controls. If you're a savvy advertiser, I don't think that you'll run into too many issues. It is newer, and it is more nuanced than the sponsored ads. There can be benefits to working with a partner agency, or a partner platform like Perpetual that offers a DSP managed service in order to help with this type of management. If you aren't looking for a managed service, we do also have a self serve option that can help you manage your DSP ads as well. It's meant to streamline the whole process. And a lot of the technical setup is sort of taken off your plate and done behind the scenes. There are a few more things that DSP can really help you with. So we mentioned branded search before with influencer, right? I think when you're in that awareness stage, this is something that extends to DSP as well. We often do see increased branded search. When brands start advertising the DSP, right, if someone sees your ad on Amazon Prime television, or if they're seeing that through Twitch tv, they're no longer looking just at the category now they're familiar with your brand, right, and we can get them to be actioning branded search on Amazon rather than a Category Search again, lower CPCs for you. And higher conversion rates. This is ideally what we'd like to see with funneling shoppers through the funnel starting from upper funnel with DSP, moving them down, either if there's consideration of editorials, or moving down directly into some type of organic or paid placement on Amazon. Having that multi touch is super, super important. We generally see that if there is a multi touch for advertisements, in any given category really. Conversion rates are much much higher. With DSP, you also do get retargeting. So if that, you know multi touch strategy is important to you. You can retarget the types of shoppers that are more likely to purchase your product. And again, retargeting can be done on a demographic basis as well. So you can get really granular with your DSP strategy. I know it's a lot to cover. Any questions?

Aaron Conant 27:58

I was just waiting for a second. Yeah, if any questions are coming through, feel free to drop them in there. The other one that I commonly get is, is there a minimum to hit on DSP? Because I think that is I think there is one if you're going direct with Amazon, but maybe agencies platforms have a different minimum.

Jonathan Chung 28:15

Yeah, so the minimum is different. The minimum with Perpetua, it's 12 and a half K. But it is lower than typically what you'd see elsewhere. If you're going to DSDM because there is that minimum, I would look at this as something that you use to expand once you've sort of reached a certain size for a lot of shoppers, or sorry for a lot of advertisers. I wouldn't dive headfirst into DSP. If you're brand new to the space, build up that lower funnel and expand to the upper funnel. Once you've established, you know, what your advertising strategy looks like from a lower funnel perspective, what your budgets really are. And when this makes sense, start targeting the upper funnel, once you've captured on that lower funnel, awesome in terms of connecting, you know, the upper funnel, lower funnel, how is this all looking and you know, how am I supposed to make sense of this data, if they're being shown multiple DSP ads, but they convert on a sponsored product ads, right? Normally, you would just see the last touch attribution coming from Amazon, on that sponsored product ad. So you're not seeing that same type of return through DSP. If you're not able to connect these two pieces of information. More recently, Amazon has released the Amazon Marketing Cloud, which helps connect this and make sense of the entire shopper journey. So if you're looking at an individual shopper, who has had multiple touchpoints, through your advertising on DSP, and then they've come in through bottom of funnel, maybe they've seen the sponsored brand ad, and then they've converted on a sponsored product ad. All those touch points matter and they're important, especially if it's an inquiry Using that conversion rate of your customer, and being able to track that and understand what's driving the most impacted your business is very, very important. So I know a lot of people are going to be new to AMC. It is a more recent addition from Amazon. But I think for the more advanced and the more savvy advertisers, it's something that's going to be incredibly useful to make sense of all your advertising data.

Aaron Conant 30:24

So another question that comes in, how much are brands carving out of their overall Amazon ad budget to go into DSP?

Jonathan Chung 30:31

That's a great question. It varies from brand to brand, obviously. But I think as a starting point, I would look at budgeting, perhaps 25, or 30%, of your advertising budget. If you're looking to get started. If your advertising budget right now is currently very low, it might make sense to wait a little bit before you've grown to a certain size before you want to start tackling this, I would say for users, or sorry for advertisers that are around that 30k. Mark, once you started to push past that, I think that's when it starts to play a role in the consideration factor of you know, should I be advertising on DSP? Is this the next best step for me? Or do I need to continue doubling down on perhaps a lower or mid funnel strategy perhaps?

Aaron Conant 31:22

Is there a typical time before you see the return as well?

Jonathan Chung 31:27

That's a great question. Yeah, the, what I generally see is that returns are not as immediate, as you would see with a lower funnel strategy, like sponsored products. A lot of DSP advertising, because it is a more upper funnel, it's meant to help feed that lower funnel with these multiple touchpoints, getting them into the lower funnel, where we're able to capture and convert that customer. So generally, if you're looking to start a DSP advertising, it will generally take, you know, maybe a few months to start realizing those returns. And seeing that you have you know, a good funnel of customers that you're able to manage and that you're able to push towards a conversion.

Aaron Conant 32:13

Yeah, other CF questions that some people join halfway through here, drop into the chat, drop them the q&a, we'll get them answered.

Jonathan Chung 32:18

Now, we mentioned before that there are a number of different touch points you can have with DSP, with sponsored products, monitor, display, etc. And I think a lot of people are probably thinking on this call, you know, which of these is the right option for me, right? Bit of an information overload. There's a lot of options coming up from Amazon right now. How do I know what the right one for me is? Realistically, a lot of these can work together, right, making sure that you're able to have multiple touchpoints. On the customer journey, leading to that conversion is incredibly important. We generally see much higher conversion rates with multiple touches. Rather than just a single impression with sponsored product or a single sponsored display impression, being able to capture that user's attention, staying in their mind, and making sure that they're moved down the funnel is really, really helpful. When you're looking for what your growth opportunities are. later down the line. There's only so much that you'll be able to capture by funneling more money into a lower funnel strategy until it becomes less and less and less efficient. At a certain point, it doesn't make a lot more sense to look at the upper funnel to make sure that you're capturing a wider audience.

Aaron Conant 33:34

Yeah, I don't I don't have other questions coming in. But feel free to drop them in. So love it, though. Yeah.

Jonathan Chung 33:41

That covers most of the upper funnel strategies that I wanted to cover today. If there are any other questions, feel free to drop them in the chat in or listen to more of an open discussion.

Aaron Conant 33:52

Awesome. So yeah, open discussion time. So drop questions in the chat. And we'll kind of feel them as we go. One thing that often comes up is like, on the on the influencer side, you said people own the content. What about what are the content is like off brand? What? What do you do with that content? Right. That's kind of a concern as a whole. Yeah.

Jonathan Chung 34:15

So I think there's during the content creation process, I think brands have a big concern about I'm putting a lot of trust in this influencer to showcase my product and the way that I want. But you don't know if their vision will line up with what the brand actually is looking for. If you're using Perpetua to manage your influencer marketing, there is a revision process that we have with the influencers. So you're not just you know, putting out a request for you know, for content and then they're launching something new and you're getting charged by that influencer. Know you are looking at a number of influencers. That can, you know, offer to work with you. You can review the content that they create and if you You want to refine or you're not entirely happy with the content that they've generated? You're able to send feedback notes. And they can make revisions on the content. So that back and forth is really helpful in order to create content. That's exactly what the brand is looking for.

Aaron Conant 35:19

Awesome. A question come in comes in. What's your experience with post purchase contextual and audience targeting? Where do those fall into the different ad types mentioned in the presentation.

Jonathan Chung 35:34

So looking at post purchase, and contextual advertising, I think this is really where DSP would be stepping in. So if I have shoppers that have purchased my product, and I know that this is going to be a shopper that I want to engage with somewhere down the line, right, I want to make sure that this, this buyer is showing my ad in two months time, maybe three months time, maybe there's a certain lifecycle that my product has. Or maybe I want to retarget them with a complimentary item, right? Suppose there's, this will be a terrible example. But suppose you sell gumball machines, and you know that your gumball machine runs out of gum in about three months, about two and a half months later, you might want to retarget them not again with a gumball machine. But with a refill pack of gumballs. You can look at that type of advertising with DSP to capture both on demographic level but also by shopper behavior, right? So I want to retarget these customers, I want to stay engaged with them after they purchase my product. Let's use DSP to target those customers.

Aaron Conant 36:49

Got it. Right. So then, how many different I mean, it doesn't just have to be DSP, right? I mean, nor is that the only one where you can put in the time in the contextuality of it all.

Jonathan Chung 36:56

So you can retarget with sponsored display as well. I think there does come a challenge with how granular you want to get again. And this is why if you're looking at a much more sophisticated strategy, I would probably push people towards DSP. If they're looking to get more granular with how they want to retarget. If you have specific conditions, maybe combining some AND OR logic with retargeting types. That's when I would push you towards DSP over something like sponsor display.

Aaron Conant 37:34

Awesome. So they're like, are there things that you get asked all the time in this space? And again, you're gonna be able to feel free to drop questions in there. Great. Are there other things that you get asked all the time that we just didn't happen to cover on this webinar today?

Jonathan Chung 37:48

Actually, yes, I think a very common question I get is from I think a lot of brands are in a place where they've advertised heavily with sponsored products. And maybe they haven't had the best experience in the past with sponsored brands or display. Right. I think, you know, I tried to it's not for me, you know, but how can I know if it makes sense for me to take that next step? If I'm seeing the results with sponsored products, and not with these other ad units? Right, I think taking that next step is the hardest part for a lot of advertisers. And, you know, it's not always the best time sometimes it doesn't make more sense to funnel more money into sponsored products. I think it depends on the goals of the advertiser. Right? Each of these different ad units can drive results, but they also have very intended use cases, right? So if I'm looking for awareness, and I want to target that upper funnel, I'm not getting that responsive products, I need to look at another ad unit, if that's part of my strategy, it's time to shift away from sponsored products. Right? If I'm looking at incrementality, and I'm seeing, you know, maybe my A cos isn't where it used to be last year, maybe things are heating up, they're getting more competitive, maybe sponsor products is getting way more saturated. But maybe that same type of saturation doesn't exist in sponsored brands from yet maybe I'm under index there. Maybe that's more relevant for me at this time, because I've sort of scaled to the point where sponsor products doesn't produce the same results. So from an incrementality standpoint, it might be about timing, to look at sponsor brands or a sponsor display. Right now, we're looking at editorials and influencer again, a little bit more upper funnel. So I think when people are considering the type of product they really have, and where they are at their, you know, in their lifecycle with either the product or the brand. looking at expanding beyond Amazon PPC is sort of, you know, a great next step, especially if you're in a more highly reviewed space, where editorials make sense. Or if you're in an area where you need to develop some brand awareness and you could benefit from more trust being advocated for by an influencer, right so there is a sort of pairing of what does my brand need right now? And what's the best ad unit that fits that need? I don't think there's a one right answer for everyone. But that's something that I think brands need to consider that they're not currently thinking about.

Aaron Conant 40:14

Yeah, it is interesting how, you know, if you look back a few years, like the Amazon advertising strategy was primarily, you know, AMS I'm old school, right? And then DSP popped up. But now we've gotten even more complicated, where, when you're thinking about your overall full funnel, Amazon advertising strategy, they're also talking Meta, you know, Insta, TikTok. It's just interesting to see how that's evolved. And now when we start talking about advertising budgets, how are those allocated across all the different channels? And where are you driving the traffic to? And then what's the balance, because I've seen, you know, I've talked to multiple brands now who are doing what you're talking about, which is driving traffic through, you know, influencers to Amazon, to get the increase in, you know, organic search rank, and they get the conversion, without actually using DSP to retarget to drive them back to their direct consumer site, which is the exact opposite of what people would ever think about doing three years ago.

Jonathan Chung 41:21

So it's interesting that all these other different options, it can be extremely overwhelming. And I think, when brands are looking at, you know, what is a should I be on Instacart? Right, is that is that even for me? It is about relevancy. So I think, existing across all this ad space is important. And the biggest thing that I would, you know, start pushing that maybe people aren't considering it, just visibility into data. Right? If your product exists in store shelves, of local grocery stores, it's likely that you're already gaining some Instacart sales, but you don't have any insight into that you don't have that data to work with. So you're sort of flying blind, making sure that you understand what your presence is on Instacart. And that you're able to manage those ads can be super helpful. Same thing with Walmart, right? If you are looking to advertise on Walmart, it's a great channel to expand to they are still catching up with Amazon in terms of their reach. But again, having this data and understanding your consumers purchasing habits, is very helpful to understand where should my money be going? And where is the most? What is the most beneficial for my brand? At this moment?

Aaron Conant 42:44

Awesome, I guess we kind of get almost to the end here, like key takeaways or other things that pop up all the time. And, you know, just kind of the last call for questions here if people want to drop them in.

Jonathan Chung 42:56

Yeah, I think something that we get a lot as well, is specifically with off site editorials. People say, you know, why do I want my product appearing with my competitors products? Like, shouldn't I just showcase my product? Am I paying for their placement there. And I think what this boils down to is how, you know, organic and genuine a product review will feel right, sometimes if you're showcasing one product, it feels like a paid placement. People feel like they're looking at an ad. When it's comparative, looking at your product compared to other products. It doesn't come off the same way. Shoppers tend to be a little bit more receptive in that sense, where it doesn't feel like you're shoving your product down their throat, it's more unbiased, even though your product is going to be taking up that best overall choice placement. That is more beneficial. And that will be leading to more conversions. Well, awesome.

Aaron Conant 43:58

Jonathan, as we kind of get to the end here, I don't have any other questions that have come in over chat or the q&a. But you guys are great friends, partner, support us and network, encourage anybody here have a follow up conversation with them and their team. They're doing just fantastic things. And they're helping a ton of brands out across the network. So 100% worth of follow up conversation with them. From my side, I'd love to have a conversation with you as well. I'd love to pick your brain more than happy to network knowledge share, like you know what I see going on across the digital landscape as a whole. And that's not just Amazon or paid media. It's everything direct to consumer, drop, shipping, international expansion, whatever it might be. And if anybody ever needs help with partner selection across the board, just you know, shoot me an email. We've got a rundown of the shortlist of the top service providers across anything in digital right now. Obviously, Perpetual is right there. They're doing some fantastic things. They have a fantastic platform. They're helping a ton of brands across the board. So with that I think we're going to wrap up this webinar here. Thanks again, Jonathan for your time today. It's been fantastic. Thanks everybody for dialing in and the great questions. Hope everybody has a fantastic Thursday. Everybody, take care, stay safe and look forward to having you on a future event.