Aaron Conant  0:18  

Happy Tuesday everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder and managing director here at BWG Connect where we're just a giant networking group of 1000s of brands who do exactly that we network and knowledge share together, stay on top newest trends, pain points, strategies, whatever it might be that shaping digital. Today, we're going to host close to 100 in person, small format dinners this year and tier one cities, we'd love to meet some people there. You know, we'll be at Amazon unboxed. later on this month, if you're going to show up there, we'll be doing a dinner with the Media.Monks team. Just let us know. We'd love to meet a bunch of people in person and put faces with names. I know I've chatted with a lot of people on the line today. That's where I spend most of my time is chatting with brands and figuring out Hey, what are you trying to solve for what are the topics that you're most interested in. And when the same ones come up over and over again, we host an event like this. It's also we're reaching out to people talking to like, Hey, who's the people are helping you out the most in this space. And that's how we get the resident experts to come on and help teach the community as a whole. A couple of housekeeping items. As we get started. Starting three to four minutes after the hour, we're going to wrap up with three to four minutes to go in the hours. Well, we're gonna give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. The other thing is we like to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time, if you have a question, drop into the chat, drop into the q&a or just email me Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com. And we'll get them answered real time. And with that, I think it's a great time to go ahead and kick it off. I mean, topical right prepping for q4 in the holiday season with Amazon very, very topical. And so great friends over Media.Monks for years now. Mike, I'll kind of kick it over to you. If you want to do a brief intro on yourself. The Media.Monks would be awesome, then kick it quick to Jack and Scott. And then we'll jump into some of the content. So I'm good.

Mike Battista  2:02  

You got it sounds good. Aaron. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Welcome. Thanks for being here. My name is Mike Battista. I'm a Senior Business Development Manager here at Media.Monks formerly senior advertising manager. A little bit about us. We are a full service global agency. Here we are the Performance Division here we are calling ourselves performance monk's full service eCommerce division in our legacy companies, Orca Pacific, which was a company in Seattle for about 14 years. We're born and bred in Seattle, about two blocks away from the Amazon campus. And like myself, large majority of the employees that are working here are either ex Amazonians, or industry leaders in the space. So we're really proud to have that really strong relationship with Amazon. We work with brands, anybody from new to Amazon to very well established brands who have already been selling for a number of years. And we work to grow their top line revenue, their incremental revenue, as well as to better understand and fix some of the main issues that are related to content optimization to advertising, operational strategy, right inventory planning, demand forecasting. So we help with that overall strategy, consulting execution to maximize potential on the platform. So a little bit about us. I'd like to kick it to our Director of Business Management here, Scott.

Scott Miller  3:32  

Thanks, Mike. Yeah, that was a pretty comprehensive description what we do so I'll just talk about myself not doing that. So I actually came directly from Amazon. I was there for about two years, I worked on the retail side as its unit vendor manager before going to the seller side as a senior product manager. I learned a lot at Amazon. And prior to that, I did a brief stint at Walmart. I also worked I've been in retail and customer service, actually my entire career. I came to Amazon directly from grad school law degree and an MBA. So just what I what I do on my team is a lot of the but Microsoft operations and strategy consulting. We work with a lot of brands, a lot of different sizes, and just excited to be here to talk about q4 Even though it's read upon us, there's still a lot that can be learned and a lot can be done.

Aaron Conant  4:32  

Awesome, Jackie. Hi, everyone. My

Jackie Andreetta  4:35  

name is Jackie Andreetta. I'm one of the associate directors on the advertising side. So today I'll be talking to you about best practice best practices for advertising for q4 Prime Day being upon us today and everything. And I come with six years of Amazon advertising experience on the agency side of everything Seeing Amazon sponsored ads DSP and in between. So I've been working with a lot of brands on across all the various categories, sellers and vendors and everything, and plenty of regions to go into the information we're talking about today.

Aaron Conant  5:19  

Awesome. So a quick reminder, if you have questions along the way, drop them in the chat the q&a, or email them to me, Aaron Aaron@bwgconnect.com. Also just had a cold queue, I'm going to drop the link, if you want to register for the dinner, we have, obviously a limited number of seats. And I'll drop that into the chat here if anybody wants to check it out. But, Mike, I'll kick it back over to you. If you want to kind of roll through the deck here. That would be awesome. And we'll just deal questions as they pop in. For sure.

Mike Battista  5:46  

Very quick recap here, guys, just to get it kicked off. We'll obviously going to talk about Prime Day. Today a little bit about the 2022 recap so far. We want to talk about in preparation for q4. What are the main considerations we need to be thinking about in terms of retail readiness, there are many different things that are going to come into play here in order to judge for success correctly. One of which is going to be supply chain management. So we're going to talk about the steps to take for successful Supply Chain Management in consideration of all of these this large influx of traffic that should be coming through within the next 90 days. With that traffic, we need to find a way to connect with those people. In q4. We'll talk about how to incentivize those people. I think it's going to be a very important thing this year in particular. So we'll talk about holiday sales talk about promotional vehicles. And again, along the same lines and connecting with shoppers in the category advertising campaigns, how do we successfully reach shoppers who are interested in our products or like products. Jackie's also going to touch on the Amazon Marketing stream. And we certainly want to leave some room for questions at the end. So let's dive in here with the Prime Day 2020 To recap.

Jackie Andreetta  7:13  

Perfect, thanks, Mike. So obviously with pumpkin spice primed, as you're calling it underway today, and tomorrow wanted to give a recap of Prime Day from July of this year. So just some highlights and in general how to leverage the information from this past time day in the the Prime Day that's happening right now into informing the rest of your q4 strategies also. But just a few quick highlights. I know we were kind of talking about the peak hours of shopping a little bit earlier when you're just catching up at the beginning of this call. But this year, the peak shopping hours in terms of actual purchases happened on day two of Prime Day between eight to 9pm. So something to really keep in mind as we talk later on into advertising strategies, and day parting with marketing stream as well is that this is right at the tail end of Prime Day people making those last minute purchases, keeping things browsing things throughout Prime Day and ultimately pulling the trigger on the purchases. After seeing what deals they can scrape together at the last day and those last hours or days. Yeah,

Aaron Conant  8:26  

it's really quick. That's 11 to midnight. That's literally last night. Yep.

Jackie Andreetta  8:34  

On the second date as well. It's not even on the first day, it's just everything, you know, compiling everything in your cart, like we were talking about, see if it's going on sale. If it's 11pm, Eastern or 8pm. Pacific, those they're not going to go on sale any further beyond that. So the making those purchases at that time right at the end.

Aaron Conant  8:55  

It really quick. Just that everybody you drop questions in like the first one is a will the presentation be shared? Can we connect you with people afterwards to share the presentation? Is that cool? Yes. Yeah. Okay. And then then may stop people from like scribbling everything down. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, but I think you nailed it. One thing I want to make sure we tackle and Jackie are kind of you said at the beginning is like leveraging Prime Day, what are those key things that we pull out? To get into q4 like to plan our q4 strategy? We look back and we're gonna rehash some of that stuff. You know, how does that help shape q4 for us? So anyways, I know you've mentioned that as I thought it was a great thing to dive into a little bit.

Jackie Andreetta  9:35  

Exactly. So from an advertising perspective, leveraging the advertising strategies that you did see success in or taking the learnings from what was not successful from Prime Day and applying that obviously to the Prime Day right now. But beyond that to the q4 season as there's the lead in to the turkey five Black Friday, Cyber Monday period and just all the way right up until that that cut off right before Christmas. So making sure you're leveraging that advertising strategy as well as what we'll touch on a bit later as well in terms of your promotional strategy and highlighting which products to promote as well to. And then obviously, right now, this is this new second Prime Day event, this is just the kickoff into q4. So we really want to make sure you're keeping that momentum that you're hopefully building up today that you lead into this Prime Day and just keeping writing out this momentum, Intel, the lead in that tricky five period, that's only a month and a few a month, in a week or so away. It's all approaching fast. But a few other just highlights here in that there in the weeks leading up to Prime Day customers shopped from small businesses, in their support small businesses to win big sweepstakes when big sweepstakes that they program that they did last Prime Day with some of the largest states participating is being Delaware, New York and Wyoming in the small supporting small businesses and then some of these best selling categories that we kind of continuous trends that we see on Prime Day as being consumer electronics, household essentials, and beyond those big ticket items that are hot, hot products going into Prime Day events, as well as into q4 that are going to be heavily discounted.

Aaron Conant  11:38  

So a quick question that comes in is what are you seeing across the board for discounts? q4. I mean, it's been an interesting couple of years, right? Where when people have been short on inventory, the discount specially last a couple of years, the discounts during q4 have been a little bit lower, actually say a lot lower. You know, what do you guys see from a discount? Is there going to be more? Are you advising brands to discount more this year?

Mike Battista  12:08  

From an inventory perspective, I'm glad you brought that up. We're going to talk about this in a few slides. Amazon is continuing to truncate orders for q4 For for some vendors right. When there is a planned let a plan system of less inventory to be coming in within the next couple of months. The key here is to align your operational strategy with your advertising strategy there in terms of staying, staying consistent with how much traffic is coming into the detail pages. And so I think one to answer your question, I think the the more incentive, the most incentive that you can give this year, the better, because we're seeing right some during inflationary and deflationary periods. And during this period of economic sort of uncertainty right now, consumer confidence is dropping a bit. And consumer sales are dropping a bit, the more incentive that you can give, I think the better but there's also needs to be a balance there. Because if you liquidate all of your inventory, you know, immediately and we're uncertain if Amazon is going to continue to buy more, that puts us at a very large disadvantage when it comes when we actually hit these really large peak days. And peak seasons. We want to remain consistent over these next 90 days to consistently maintain our relevancy score with the algorithm make sure that sound and also just to stay on all day to ensure that when potential shoppers are coming to our detail pages, things are in stock and that that trust is continues to stay bill. From a percentage standpoint, guys, can you think of if that's, you know, kind of digging in a little bit more on that question from a percentage standpoint, anything that you guys would add to that on in terms of how much percentage to add to a particular deal? Yeah,

Scott Miller  14:09  

thanks. Mike. So there's, it's gonna be a different strategy based on category based on the GL. But basically, you need to compete on these days not only with your direct competitors, but you need to compete for dollars across Amazon. As we were discussing earlier in the call, you know, people are looking for big discounts and people that can find a flat screen TV juicers, Vitamix, etc. So you need to put in whatever discount you can to support those sales because you're competing for dollars in a time of economic uncertainty. There's a little bit more nuance to it. And as Mike stated, we need to make sure we remain in stock and so sometimes the strategy is to not go for those sales. Repeat so that you can maintain that relevancy throughout. And you are winning those sales, even in the off peak timeframe. So in terms of percentages, it's really going to vary, but from what we're seeing the percentages are not as steep as we've seen in the past, especially just even as recent as Prime Day in July.

Aaron Conant  15:24  

Awesome, love it. Thanks. So just to remind others drop questions in the chat to q&a or email them to me, Aaron@bwgconnect.com.

Mike Battista  15:32  

Awesome. Thanks, guys. Jackie, anything else to add to this primary slides before we move

Jackie Andreetta  15:38  

on No, nothing else to add here, we could move into the next the next one. Wonderful. So if you joined any of our Media.Monks webinars, you've probably seen some version of this slide. Because it's really important that we always want to touch on when we talking about like getting ready for any kind of season, whether that's cute q4 holiday, whatever it is, we want to make sure we touch on all of this information here. And so like Like mentioned, you guys will get a copy of this. So no need to write all these things down. But think of this somewhat as a checklist. And we'll dive a bit deeper into inventory that we have been alluding to as well, after this. But these are all really key items to make sure before we set up advertising before we have inventory, we need to make sure everything is working together and split spinning that Amazon flywheel so everything is the advertising dollars, the promotions that are running are all working to enhance the pages themselves and spark reviews all of that. So this checklist is mainly around kind of around the product page itself. So between the title the bullet points, making sure we have reviews, making sure those are the retail ready products. And then in relation to q4. I just want to touch on additional things. For retail readiness to keep in mind as we approach the holiday season when we think of brand stores and advertising, updating that to be seasonal as well. We want to make sure you're staying on top of the changes with the holiday you're not having a stale brand store stale content either. So definitely recommend making sure as we head into the q4 season, updating any messaging within advertising, making sure that aligns with any updates that you're any kind of updated promotional messaging on your store, making sure you have those q4 deal tabs added to your store, it's easy to navigate for the consumer. So beyond just the regular retail readiness, specific to q4. Want to make sure we're calling that out as well here.

Aaron Conant  17:53  

Are there major updates that need to be done between q3 and q4? Like specifically, I this is far outside of a normal routine update.

Jackie Andreetta  18:04  

I mean, I'd say more specifically, just when we head into q4 We see a lot of banners updated on the stores. A q3 is a big time for back to school for a lot of brands, if that applies. So just making sure you're transitioning out of one season to the next and making sure your content is aligned across all avenues from advertising to pages to posts making sure you're active on Amazon posts as well. And making sure just everything is in alignment together in that in that sense.

Mike Battista  18:37  

And one thing to add to that as well. When you think about the large influxes of traffic that are going to be coming through more than likely more than usual to your product detail pages, you can think about it like, right, if you want to put a billboard up in a very rural place, you're going to have a small percentage of the population see that billboard during these peak seasons or what we can equate to, let's say putting a billboard in Times Square, you're going to want that billboard to be perfect. Maybe those shoppers don't buy on the first or second time that they're on that detail page. But they certainly will remember if it isn't a good experience. So you're not only prepping for those impulse buys the shoppers that are buying right now. You're prepping for brand awareness so that the next time that need comes up within the shoppers journey, they'll have a higher percentage of likelihood of remembering you navigating to those detail pages again and hitting that Add to Cart

Aaron Conant  19:37  

button. Awesome. Love it. So really quick. Oh here we go. Question comes in. Is it worth investing in holiday themed content for PDP pages? Or does that not make a difference to conversion rates?

Scott Miller  19:54  

I would like to jump in here just to say that we're currently going through this with just compliance in that, and it can make a difference. But it really depends again on the category. And I would I would make sure is focusing less on trying to make it very specifically towards the holiday and focusing on what are the intentions of the update. And it's usually to drive traffic to seasonal items. And so I would if it makes sense to have traffic driven to that seasonal items, I think it can, it can really help conversion. I don't have any firm numbers on that. But I think you really have to kind of consider, do we have this seasonality on these products, if so, let's go ahead and make that update. But it isn't a necessary optimization for every client or every vendor.

Mike Battista  20:53  

Awesome. So we're going to talk a little bit about supply chain management, about inventory planning. There are many considerations that need to be that need to be looked at consistently throughout, especially with peak season. Because if we do not have a solid inventory forecast for the next 90 days, if we're not managing that inventory properly, and looking at those reports, there will be misalignment with your advertising campaigns. There could be misalignment, even sometimes, within your content strategy, your variation strategy on site, as well, which will really throw a wrench into your plans for success over the next 90 days. So Right. Without this alignment, promotions aren't set up properly, they are not aligned back in greatly affect your ability to be able to reach new consumers and get additional incremental sales versus what your competitors are doing. If the demand forecasting and inventory plan is not going to be perfect, right. But it certainly needs to be certainly needs to be buttoned up as much as possible. If it's not aligned with what, especially even with what your advertising is doing, how much ad allocation is happening for specific products, that we've almost seen that as detrimental to some businesses, especially if you have a seasonal business, right. So you want to ensure that, you know, the A, the items that are providing a majority of percentage of your business throughout the year or throughout q4 are first and foremost prioritized in terms of this inventory alignment. But but also right, ensuring that you have some sort of strategy for what we would like to call maybe a tier two Asin. That something that needs a little bit more more reviews, that's something that you'd like to liquidate, you know, maybe a new product launch that you guys would like to launch. Those are going to need additional additional eyes more traffic to build up those reviews to increase that relevancy on site as well. And we don't want to run out of stock though, either, right? So that balance is going to be important. Again, right, harks back on what we were talking about just a few slides ago. So inventory and advertising go hand in hand here from a dropship capability as well. You know, if we understand that not every single seller or vendor on Amazon has has that capability. If you do have that capability, this is something that you also, you know, want to ensure that you are utilizing fully so that you can somewhat mitigate some of the extra lag times that are potentially going to happen with so much inventory flying off of shelves, getting into Amazon's packed warehouses and packed trucks so that you can get to customers in a timely fashion. And continue to spin the flywheel there as well. I can pause though, Scott, anything else you would add to that? Yeah,

Scott Miller  24:13  

I just want to echo a little bit of what you said. If you've ever spoken or been on a call with the in stock manager at Amazon, you know that they'll swear by their P 70. Forecast, but it's not always accurate, as we all know. Right? Shock. But, so what we recommend, as Mike said, making sure your setup and direct fulfillment and you need to make sure if you have the inventory, set it up. So you can convert those sales, the ship Windows might look a little bit different. But having that as a backstop for especially promotions, which we're going to talk about in a little bit is key to managing your inventory and being able to stay relevant within the Amazon algorithms. I think when we look at last year, compared to this year, last year was a different story. A lot of brands were still out of stock and a lot of items. And so it was kind of pushed the traffic towards whatever you had. And this year is a different story. Amazon is holding a lot of inventory, or brands are holding a lot of inventory. But Amazon isn't ordering, what we what we expected, or what we've seen, especially first half of this year, and then 2021 2020. So we have to make sure that whatever is going to be in stock, aligning with advertising and not advertising towards the products, which Amazon may run out of stock, you don't have direct fulfillment set up. And the same is true for sellers on Seller Central. If you can't ship through FBM, you may want to consider spending your advertising dollars on the products but you can fulfill even if they're not your top sellers. And as Mike said, that could actually help pull up some of your items, which may be tier two or tier three, so that you can still get those sales, but it might not be on the products you're used to seeing them on. I think the biggest key here is if you can, if you had the inventory sell early and often and replenish because we are, like I said, in a time of economic uncertainty, and we can't predict what those sales are going to look like during FY five and through December. And so if you can win that sale now, and to get Amazon to replenish it, you'll just have the inventory there for the case, if people are still have that disposable income come November, December.

Aaron Conant  26:42  

Now just jump in just I couldn't agree more just from the brands that I'm talking to, you know, it's it's a high volume, it's, you know, 20 or 30 a week, in this time of the time of scarcity, which has been you know, the past couple years, Amazon was overbuying to make sure it had enough. But now when they know that a lot of companies that are sitting on excess inventory, they're not buying as much and they don't need to. And it's not that they're not going to sell as much but kind of what you're saying Scott is so early and often a fly through that, because they will keep replenishing it, they're just not going to hold 14 weeks of inventory anymore, because they don't need to they know if they send you a Pio tomorrow, most people are cutting it and shipping it the next day to make sure it gets out. And the other one is like what you guys are saying about having a backup drop shipper. I mean, that has to be part of your strategy, going forward, it has to be because of Amazon's only holding two weeks and you can't get trucks in there. Because so many trucks are going out, you're just gonna miss sales, you're gonna go out of stock, you know, and that gets just into the death spiral down. But if anybody needs connections to like, drop shipping companies that can help out with that, just shoot me an email or, you know, chat me here or shoot me an email at Aaron Aaron@bwgconnect.com. Because that's a necessity, you guys are nailing it. I mean, it's awesome. And just remind others, you have questions, drop them in, and we'll keep getting them answered.

Mike Battista  28:10  

So I'm aligned with trying to liquidate as much inventory as possible is incentivizing these consumers. And I think this goes you know, directly in line with the current conversation during times of economic uncertainty, right and and certainly we always want to be striving for a winning strategy, something that that we can say that really rationalize additional adspend and rationalize the methodology that we're using to try to get to page one, the more traffic that we can drive to listings is certainly one of the key pieces to triggering that algorithm. And Lightning Deals best deals promotions are all really great vehicles for driving additional traffic there. Again, especially during times like this, customers will need incentive over the next 90 days here. So if the the supply chain and inventory management piece is aligned, absolutely I would kind of go in here couple things on sales and promotions you know, it's going to take a couple of weeks right to be able to set these set these deals up. These windows are going to be fast closing Scott, Jackie, do you have indications yet on when these deals are going to be closing for the next couple of months? Is there kind of a an urgency here if if any company hasn't set these up yet?

Scott Miller  29:50  

So I'll I'll jump in first to say that Amazon has already kind of said that that the best deal and the Lightning Deal deadline have passed, but being internally at Amazon and then also, over the last several months being outside, those deadlines are usually a little bit gray. And they will open up if they see that there's opportunity for more deals to be presented the open that window up, and she'll be able to put in. But these in if you need to, this is where coupons can really come in and make a difference. If you haven't had the time to set up the best deals or Lightning Deals, that coupon should still be available. And although you're not getting a dedicated detail page, we see a lot of conversion, when you even just have that little green tag that says coupon during chi five, and during times like today, we do recommend making sure that it's it's a percentage that it's going to attract people outside of those major selling timeframes. I think even 5% can make a difference. Jackie, do you have any other insights on

Jackie Andreetta  31:00  

that? I mean, I do agree when we're talking about q4, and you're comparing yourself from advertising perspective as well. Price is key on Amazon. So much like Scott said, a small discount, even it's only 5% could be the differentiator between your product, and one that's not on sale, when that's what people are really looking for during these holiday shopping periods throughout the next two months

Aaron Conant  31:29  

here. Yeah, quick question comes in better to do a lightning deal with steeper discount or a longer term promo with a leaner discount. And then another one comes in around coupons versus best do exactly what you have here coupons versus best deals versus Lightning Deals. Which one do we do? What should the most Yeah,

Scott Miller  31:50  

yeah, so it's something I recommend. And it's a different strategy, depending on the products we're looking at. If we have newer products that you want to try to gain some traction on, get some reviews for, we recommend Lightning Deals. Because otherwise, people aren't gonna be able to find those products, it has to work its way up through the Amazon algorithm. So for newer products, products, which haven't sold as well in the past, we recommend a Lightning Deal to throw it up onto a page and there's a little call to action with a 12 hour window. As it gets closer and closer, we do tend to see those sales increased rapidly, because people will put it in their cart come back later and make that purchase. So it's a limited inventory. And it is something that we recommend for newer like I said, or products, which haven't sold as well in the past, when you do have products which have good ranking, they have great reviews, they have clean, nice detail pages, which we haven't even talked about much. But that's a big part of conversion. I recommend best deals in that case and try to put as many products from your brands into the best deal as possible. Because people may come in looking for one thing on your brand and they end up purchasing something else. And if it's all on the same deal page, you can get a lot more traffic to a lot of your different products. And I just kind of worked backwards on this side. But the difference between coupons and best deals, best deals I think are best for products which you have not unlimited, but you have a larger budget for products if you have several across the same brand that you can get onto one page to increase the traffic to I think best deals are best there. But coupons can make a big difference for if you want to limit the spend if you want to limit the discount, and you want a little bit more control over how much you sell and in what time period.

Mike Battista  33:53  

Awesome. One more quick thing to add about what Jackie said in aligning with advertising we see a really great example here on the left with coupons in regards to Subscribe and Save orders. You're selling products that are consumable products that are products that are being re bought every week every two weeks every three weeks quite often you know or even even more often than that and you're not currently measuring your Subscribe and Save metrics this is a really great way to kickstart that and start measuring that when we take a look at those Subscribe and Save orders this is absolutely the definition of brand loyalty here right and so when we are kind of constructing our funnel in in terms of what kind of consumers are brand loyal to us, who may be shopping for us and who really don't know about us at all but could be you know in the wheelhouse of this product you know having that bottom of the funnel clearly defined and being able to rationalize additional ad spend or or anything right internally within the company in relation to Amazon Subscribe and Save and brand loyalty will be A really great piece to that. So, you know, to entice consumers to, you know, be able to take their hands off the wheel, and have those products be shipped to them on a cadence that they select, I think is, you know, a really positive thing. Awesome. Love it. Love it. So, best practices for advertising campaigns, Jackie, I'll kick it over back to you.

Jackie Andreetta  35:31  

So before kind of jumping into these three things to consider is just best practices when you approach advertising, especially into the holiday holidays is this piece right at the bottom here, which Scott touched on as well, in that advertising, we're going to be driving the job of advertising is to drive the most qualified traffic to the PDPs. But that's where this flywheel comes into place. And that retail readiness, so everything on the Detail page, the reviews, the content, everything about the Detail page, that's what drives conversion, ultimately. So these really need to work hand in hand. So referencing back to that retail readiness slide we covered earlier, that kind of checklist up at the front there, those things that really need to work hand in hand in hand with advertising to make sure you're gonna have success in the long term player ever been strategy, but going into your promotional strategies as well. But to dive into the best practices on the advertising side, so three things to keep in mind here. And some of this, we've touched on and alluded to earlier, as well, in terms of making a key strategy, improving your organic ranking and having advertise, be that lever to push your products up through their organic ranking. So you're not in the short term. And in the long term, you're not focusing, you're not relying on advertising to make those sales for you, you're seeing improvements in organic ranking and page visibility, and that your products are moving up the ranks and becoming more visible over time without having to invest as much by making everything making sure everything is working together, they're so so the type of products that you're promoting, whether it's the products that are of inventory that we talked about earlier, that might not be your tier one products, but those are the products that have inventory, those are ones that we want to track and make sure you're seeing those improvements in your organic rank. And this is all really important to implement into your evergreen strategy, especially as we lead into this peak time, this isn't something you're going to want to start doing the week before Prime Day, the week before q4, they would prefer to five, this is going to be your evergreen strategy so that you can see those improvements over time and really build that foundation. So kind of leading into the second point is making sure you have that strong patent foundation in place from your branded co branded searches that lower funnel kind of building block, build a bottoms up approach to making sure you're capturing from a long tail up to the shorter, broader the shorter tail broader terms, and making sure you're building upon your existing strategies, as opposed to casting a really wide net and then narrowing it down and being as efficient as possible with that bottoms up approach. And then something we've touched on in terms of inventory. It all it all factors into this last point as well, is ensuring the right number of products are promoting so what products have inventory, what are the kind of best in class examples that best in class products you have for this tiered approach to really focus your advertising dollars on what's going to be driving the most success for your business. So as opposed to, if even if you are putting a discounted price your whole catalog does, it's not going to make sense to promote from an advertising perspective, all of those products, because you really want to be able to invest in those and see those improvements on an organic ranking perspective and really be able to invest your budget into those key products as opposed to spreading your budget too thin across too many products and not seeing any impact the lift. Bye bye bye going to bed

Aaron Conant  39:32  

there. So do you see a change in the metrics being reported out? You know, beyond you know, row as and tacos, right? I mean, because you have on here YouTube traffic, its sales velocity, its organic rate. Is it measurement tracking? Are you seeing a shift there in what people are looking for in advertising in how they're explaining I think to executive teams, it just seems like for the last you know A few years executive teams get more involved row as is like this default that they can simply understand, but it's not necessarily the best metric. And are you seeing a shift? Now I just I'm looking at number three saying these are all better metrics, I think I shouldn't say I don't know if they're better. They're all great metrics to be tracking as well. Exactly. I

Jackie Andreetta  40:21  

mean, row as is a great measure of profitability. But that doesn't always align with growth and sales goals and Broads is always going to be something to keep in mind. But making sure you're tracking to growing from an organic perspective and using advertising to help support that and looking at making sure you're tracking things like your organic ranking, tracking your sales velocity, making sure advertising is having a larger impact on your entire business. As opposed to just honing in on your advertising only metrics. Since I've been on Amazon, there's that 14 Day attribution window. And in some, in some cases, with higher ticket items as well, in the decision process is a lot more beyond that, it really, you want to drive your advertising should impact your whole business, not just your advertising metrics in that kind of small bubble there. So really kind of expanding beyond that, to look at those larger metrics, like your overall order product sales, your overall shipped revenue, your shift cogs from Amazon, to making sure those things are growing with your advertising performance as well, and that you're not looking at them in silos from each other. Awesome.

Scott Miller  41:36  

All right, I just like to add, as we're looking at this, I just want to call back to what we talked about earlier with number three here. right number of products, less is more, and make sure it's products that you can remain in stock with you don't want to be promoting products, which they're gonna fly through within two weeks, and then it will take four to six weeks to bring back into Amazon because you're gonna lose a lot of that organic ranking.

Mike Battista  42:05  

And, you know, I, it's funny, because we have, we have a pretty, pretty interesting dynamic here, I used to be on the delivery team here and talking to our current clients and operating with them. Now I'm operating with prospective clients. So I'm finding, and you know, I have many conversations per day, and I'm able to see what percentage of prospective clients are looking at row as an a cost in a silo, and who are a little bit more sophisticated with that, with that knowledge. It's about this educational process. Right now, our current clients are certainly a lot more inclined to not just look at resume costs in the silo, there are many different factors that are going to affect the overall business and certainly a cornerstone of how we find success within this agency. You know, but I talked to some prospective clients, and there are still, there's still an educational gap for some, and there needs to be kind of that bridging to really fully understand how to use advertising. Not not just lean on it as a crutch, right? But use it in harmony with content optimization with your operational strategy. And then just focusing a little bit more on advertising, how to look at it from a different perspective. How are we moving the needle on the overall business here from an organic standpoint? And how do we win in the long term, not just the short term Rolleston. Awesome. Okay, Amazon Marketing stream, Jackie, you're up. So the last thing we want

Jackie Andreetta  43:47  

to touch on is Amazon Marketing stream been really hot topic coming out of Amazon accelerate, I'm sure will be another hot topic at unbox in a few weeks. And so if you haven't heard about Amazon Marketing stream already, what it is, is reports for your sponsored product keyword campaigns. So I'm not your sponsor brands or sponsored display or even your sponsor product category targeting yet. For right now with your sponsor product keyword campaigns, which are likely a bulk of your strategy on sponsored ads shied already, you have access to data through the Amazon API, to look at your hourly data across these advertising metrics. So kind of this is this screenshot here is kind of like a heat map of metrics that you're already used to looking at from advertising perspective, like your click through rate your spend your sales, your CPCs and how that changes throughout the day. So you get this breakdown from a campaign level on keyword level and keyword match type, the different placement types and so you could really filter and hone in really specifically on your strategy here. But to, it's really, it's going to be very important as you look at your Prime Day data from July as well as your Prime Day data for now. And as well as your evergreen data to kind of take a look at how your products are performing. What we tend to see in like an example here is that kind of the peak hours in terms of in terms of impressions happen throughout the middle of the day, this is obviously going to vary by your product by your campaign strategy, all of that. But this allows you to dive into those metrics really, specifically to see when those peak hours are, when are you converting the highest from a conversion rate perspective, when is it most efficient to convert from a CPC perspective to then adjust your strategies from that from that way, as well. So whether it's been scheduling, so adjusting your bids throughout the day, or even adjusting your budgets throughout the day to make sure you're in your campaigns or in budget, when the CPC is rather lowest at the later evening hours, and conversion rate and might be at might be at its highest. What are those trends that you're seeing that you can influence your campaigns and adjust those campaigns accordingly, to make sure you're taking advantage of that optimal traffic and being the most most efficient. So if efficiency is your KPI, really honing in on those low CPC hours? Or if kind of visibility is your main goal here? Where are those peak impressions happening, making sure you're bidding up on those hours making sure your campaigns are in budget during those hours, so that you have the most the most eyeballs on your campaigns? Or, like you mentioned on the efficiency standpoint, whereas it can it be if no one has unlimited budget. So if your budget is limited, where does it make most sense to put those dollars, where it's going to be converting at the highest rate at the cheapest rate for you, this data is very powerful. And since you do get it on a campaign and campaign and keyword level, you can look at this from your branded perspective, your category keywords, your competitor keywords to really make very specific strategies for all of these different types of campaigns to go into your, your evergreen campaigns, but especially going into the peak holiday when budgets and bidding is extra aggressive.

Aaron Conant  47:31  

It's like a lot of data.

Jackie Andreetta  47:36  

It is a lot. It's the filtering definitely helps. But the heat mapping, it kind of makes it a little bit easier to read as well. But it's good to comb through from an overall perspective, when you look if you send me your campaigns into branded category competitor, what are the trends across those three that you can apply to your even though this is just sponsored product data that you could then apply this to your sponsor brand, sponsor display data as well, and kind of seeing what the right segments are. So you could absorb and digest the data a bit, because it is a lot, that's it's more and more data that Amazon is giving to you, which is helpful, but um, you know, more data more problems.

Aaron Conant  48:23  

It's another thing you have to have a strategy around, right? Because now that you have the data, right, you're required to do something with it. And you're gonna be asked, Well, why did you up the bids at 9am? I, right, when you know, CPCs were the highest? Well, because conversion rate was also the highest, you have to do that every single campaign now. And then what's your strategy? Kind of like? What you were saying is, well, what are you going to use it for? Do you want impressions? Do you, you know, lower CPCs, you want a higher row as well just makes life more? I mean, it's great. I'm a data geek, I love data, right? But it also it adds another layer to the digital marketer that how do they handle this? How are you? How are you helping people handle what to do with this and setting a strategy around it? Because it's one more think about what the digital marketer has had to go through over the past like, two and a half, three years, from being set over in the corner? It's kind of cute what you're doing to oh my god, you're gonna have to save the company. There's no stores. Now you've got 1500 different tools, you know, a million lines of data. And then there's a question that comes in here. Do you see a lot of variability in the state of AI industry? You know, for example?

Mike Battista  49:39  

Yes, absolutely. It's gonna vary by industry, by company, even by product product, depending on what this is. But you can as you start to look at these kinds of data. And for those of you who don't know, this analysis was typically called day parting right? Agencies have had this type of technology for a few years so it is very, very refreshing to see Amazon final They providing this as they see more and more marketers become more savvy with and and want to get a little bit deeper into it, it absolutely will fluctuate, you'll have to take a look at this data and filter it correctly exactly what Jackie was talking about, you know, for an extended period of time and look for trends within that data. And hopefully, as they continue to iterate on on this offering here, it'll become a little bit easier and a little bit easier, as they typically do things within the marketing cloud, or the marketing suite, to analyze the data

Scott Miller  50:39  

by not to confuse this or make it any more daunting. But weekdays are different than weekends. And Friday is different than Tuesday. So you could really get in the weeds here. And that's where having the most help makes a big difference. And things like this.

Aaron Conant  50:57  

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. You guys are helping a lot of people out in this space, you guys have been great friends and partners, supporters of the network. As we kind of get to the end here. I quick, remind everybody, you need any help whatsoever in the Amazon space. The team over Media.Monks has been great friends and partners, supporters of a ton of brands in the network, it's worth a follow up conversation with them across the board. You need any recommendations across the board, like shoot me an email any point in time, we'd always scheduled time Aaron Aaron@bwgconnect.com. And that includes if you need help finding a dropship company, a QR code, anything that drives consumer space, whatever it might be. But if I kind of kick it over, you know, you know, Mike for like key takeaways, as we kind of get to the last like, minute or so here.

Mike Battista  51:46  

Yeah, absolutely. Alignment, for peak seasonality is crucial. We cannot wait until the last minute to start to worry about q4. So the more prepared that you can possibly be with as much lead time as possible, right, the better we must align your operational strategy with your advertising strategy and with your content strategy. And if you're not aligned at all, you know, I would hop on that as soon as possible. If you are already aligned and are a little bit more savvy and have kind of dealt with this process before. You know, try to refine that as much as possible as well. That's what that's how I would recap it and anything else from you guys, Scott, Jackie.

Scott Miller  52:33  

I would say just keeping in mind and everything you said, and just keep in line, you're in stock. And you're insect strategy. Gotta say that as the operations representative on the call, but making sure that you can either replenish the inventory when you sell it. And if you can't, then figuring out exactly how to keep that inventory in stock, because there's nothing worse than losing that sale to a competitor.

Aaron Conant  52:59  

Jackie, wrap it up with you. From the

Jackie Andreetta  53:03  

advertising perspective, I would just say Don't wait. Don't wait to dive in. Later dive in. Now. Now it's Prime Day, you'll have a lot of data and learnings from these these next two days. So make sure you apply that into your strategy. And the kind of prep lead in period is now for Turkey five. So don't wait a week out to start ramping up your strategies. start that process now. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  53:31  

Well, again, Jackie Scott, Mike thanks so much for your time today. Thanks for being such great friends and supporters the network. Again, thanks everybody who dialed in and the great question. So I hope everybody has a fantastic Tuesday. great rest of your week. Everybody. Take care. Stay safe. Look forward to having you at a future event. All right. Thanks again team. All right. It's been awesome.