Aaron Conant  0:18

Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder and managing director here at BWG Connect. We're a giant networking knowledge sharing group with 1000s of brands, I spend the majority of my time just advising brands and what's going on in the digital space as a whole 20 to 30 brands a week start the fortune 100 up every vertical. And, you know, a lot of that is, you know, just all around, hey, this is holistically what's going on. But in Moscow ASCII asking everybody, Hey, what are your biggest pain points? What are you trying to solve for? When the same topics come up over and over again, we host an event like this, I'm also asking them, hey, who's helping you solve for these problems. And when the same people come up over and over again, we asked them on to kind of explain the team at Media.Monks, formally Orca Pacific, for those of you who have been around for a while, it's been great friends, partners, supporters, the network since we kicked this off. And so they're gonna be here today sharing a lot of data across the board. But they're also going to be open to answering as many questions as we can throw at them. So don't hesitate to drop questions in the chat, drop them in the q&a, or email them to me, Aaron Aaron@BWGconnect.com. And that includes tomorrow next week. Hit me at that email address anytime more than happy to get back with you. The last thing is, before we kick it off, is we're starting this three to four minutes after the hour. And we're going to wrap up with three to four minutes to go as well. So just before 430 Eastern Time, we should be wrapping this up, give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. And so with that, you know, David, I'll kind of kick it over to you. If you want to do a brief intro yourself, Media.Monks, that'd be awesome. And then we can kind of jump a little bit into the content. We can cater to Johnathon and Scott as well if you'd like.

David Liggins II  1:53

Absolutely. Thank you. Appreciate that. My name is David Liggins. I have so far from Media.Monks here on Monday. I'm a Senior Business Development Manager here been with a company going on for close to a year here. Just for just a little bit background about who we are Media.Monks, just pretty much a data driven marketing and media powerhouse here. We're the performance Monks team. So we focus on performance, eCommerce and marketing. But the in within the organization over the years, you know, actually like from the orchid Pacific for the last 13 going on 14 years now. We really focus on helping that customer journey on Amazon and other marketplaces. So eCommerce marketplaces, as you may be aware of, so we have a lot of breadth of knowledge and experience here. And we're going to be talking about unbox and some of those new developments that Amazon had announced during that particular time. And I actually have my team on with me, um, so senior advertising manager, Johnathon Braga, and also our Director of Business Management of Scott Miller, to join me on the call to talk about some of the things that are now set unbox here. And so with with that quick introduction here, Johnathon, and Scott, I'll pass off to you so you can talk a little bit about your experience and who you are. And then we can kind of jump into the presentation. One thing I do, as Aaron mentioned, feel free to ask some questions here. And we're going to be fielding those questions. And we can, after each of these slides here, we can answer those questions for you. So just make sure that you're want to be engaged, want to be engaged with you as a community here to kind of share that knowledge. So with that being said, I'll pass off to you, Scott.

Scott Miller  3:25

Thanks David. Yeah, so I've been with a company since April, came on as a business manager. Now the Director of Business Management actually came directly from Amazon, where I worked for almost two years as a senior vendor manager, and then a senior product manager. Prior to that, actually did a little bit of time at Walmart. It was interesting. Were talking about Amazon and boxed in the killers were there. And that was my biggest, my biggest memory of working at Walmart was all the cool acts and events that they set up. And they had people coming in. So yeah, it's just looking back. Those are some of the perks of working at Walmart, Amazon, the bigger establishments. But yeah, so my team, we actually we run the strategy for operations. And then we also kind of bring together marketing, advertising and operations to have like a single threaded solution for the customer journey and Amazon. I am going to pass it over to Johnathon Braga. So he can give a little intro but one thing I want to make sure that he probably won't mention is we actually did just win an advertising award from I believe it was as explainer and Johnathon was actually the ad manager on that account. So I'm gonna pump him up because I know he won't do it for himself.

Johnathon Braga  4:50

Well, thanks Scott. Yeah, I was I was with our client and actually furniture, just really kind of building them out holistic advertising strategy, so exciting with this He indefinitely. But I've been with the Media.Monks team, just close to three years now worked in eCommerce for over five years, started out as a digital marketing specialist over at net rush and other agency in the space and then moved over Media.Monks about three years ago, as an advertising manager really worked in a number of different categories. With both kind of large and polar brands on Amazon. Really day to day, we're kind of building out the strategy for brands, you know, both on the paperclip side, the programmatic DSP side, and then across streaming TV, as Amazon is starting to make that more and more of a focus in their advertising ecosystem. But definitely a lot of exciting updates go over today. Definitely one of Amazon's biggest conferences that they've had really in the past two or three years. So excited to jump in some of those updates today.

Aaron Conant  5:53

I'm sorry, most excited, because I went to unboxed and maybe a lot of people here went to unboxed as well, highly highly scripted event, lots of information given almost drowned out by all the extra words that were going on. And, you know, you guys pulled a tonne of stuff out. You're gonna you're gonna capture I think in the next hour here, the next 50 minutes, you know, the entire conference and all the valuable data. So anyways, um, I'm excited. Others if you have questions, drop them in the chat or the q&a. But yeah, you know, David, I'll kick it over to you.

David Liggins II  6:30

No problem. And what before we get started here, I just want to I'll call it out specifically here, there was two awards everyone. So unbox, we have the Amazon as Partner Award for a growth partner growth award there. And coming off of another one, we had an Amazon AdExchanger growth award for Strategic Growth using Amazon ads. So I want to make sure that we're very clear that we have deep expertise and knowledge sharing. And I know Johnathon didn't really take that credit for it, but I'm going to give you the credit boss. So I just wanted to make sure that we're very clear about those two amazing awards everyone for advertising. That being said, Here, we're going to go into some of the information that they've stated and unbox here, some new developments there with Amazon, on demand side platform, also known as DSP, we're gonna go backdoored that with, you know, sponsored displays a sponsored display, excuse me with some, you know, updates and announcements they've made there, along with Amazon Marketing stream and Amazon Marketing Cloud. So that's the agenda that we have on today. And we're going to follow it up with, you know, what are our best recommendations to kind of leverage those new those features and systems there with Amazon to you know, help you unlock the potential in your growth in your business there. So with that being said, I'll pass off to you guys.

Johnathon Braga  7:40

Perfect. Thanks David, yeah, there's a ton of updates across the unbox, we really wanted to kind of, you know, there's probably 25 30 Plus updates, we really wanted to compound, all the updates that are really going to be most impactful just in terms of day to day strategy, and really kind of impacting top line revenue and the immediate future. So one of those big updates, really was sponsored display ads. Really, for about the past 12 to 18 months, we've seen a number of updates come with sponsor display, just in terms of targeting creative, but they really took it to the next level here at unbox adding four new features to sponsor display ads. Now calling out against false replay odds are the ad type that shows up on a product detail page. Most commonly, really, they're using two places one on your own product pages to really protect your page from other competitors showing up there. And then they're also use their conquesting strategies to really make sure your products are showing up on your closest competitors product detail pages. So really, the first update here is really allowing non endemic sellers to utilize sponsored display ads still, you know, if you're an insurance company, a finance company, maybe not selling your products directly on Amazon, you know, in the past, you could just utilise DSP, but you now have sponsored display, you know, pay per click ads as an option there. There's really that second big piece here on sponsored display ads is a new promotional strategy. They're kind of calling it Amazon rewards. So essentially, instead of running like a coupon, like $10 Off $20 Off during an event, they're gonna allow you to give a credit to the customers purchasing your product to say your product, you know, you're selling something you could offer a $10 Amazon credit or amazon giftcard if they purchase your product. So this is pretty monumental. Just in terms of past Amazon coupon strategies. If you ran a coupon that coupon showed up to essentially everyone or you know, Prime members, but you couldn't make a coupon that was exclusive to an ad type. So with this coupon, it's just going to show up for those customers that are seeing your sponsor display ads, and it's not going to affect your organic traffic or your organic sale. So I think just in terms of the The impact of a coupon tied with a promotional or advertising strategy on Amazon, this is going to be huge and really seeing kind of the dual impact there. That really that third, or

Aaron Conant  10:13

I want to tackle just a couple of things that popped up, which is one the non endemic. So you're talking like we're talking a little bit like a Carnival Cruise Lines? Correct? Right? Is there so they're opening it up to that to insurance? You know, I'm going to, you know, whatever it might be? Is that going to drive up? Right, you know, costs even more, or?

Johnathon Braga  10:36

I would say, so you do have few options with sponsored display ads now, you know, pay per click Pay Per 1000 impressions. So as an endemic advertiser, you can kind of or non endemic advertiser, you can kind of test each other first, you know, first paying per 1000 impressions, or paying per click on that ad type. Now, I would say, if you weren't endemic advertisers, someone selling on Amazon, yeah, there would be cause for concern, because that's going to be more brand fighting for the same amount of ad space across Amazon. So I will say with some of these options, they're opening up for non endemic sellers on Amazon, I would say we will start to see cost per click, most likely continue to rise over the next year.

Aaron Conant  11:19

Yeah. Awesome. And the next one was just the clarification. So you know, previously, you're running coupons, right? Or you're running a promo, it's actually on the Detail page, or it's a clipping COPPA coupon that anybody can get, right? Because it just shows. And now you're saying specifically around, you can run within an ad, which then you can choose who's getting targeted, essentially, right? I mean, obviously, not individuals, but you can bug it bucket how you're targeting, and those ads specifically to it with an offer in the ad.

Johnathon Braga  11:50

Yep, yeah. And I think that's what's gonna make it really powerful. You know, because you've got your brand and customers that are coming back all the time. And, you know, if you're running a coupon across the board, of course, they're all going to take advantage of it. And you're losing margin there, where with this strategy, you can really go after a specific group new. Yeah, you could also you know, there's also retargeting available with sponsor display. Now, you know, someone comes to use your product detail page doesn't make the purchase, you could retarget them with one of these reward coupons. And really kind of fill the deal after the show kind of that initial interest on after that first or second product detail page SEO. Awesome. Yeah, it's very exciting. And then really, that third piece here is going to be sponsored display video. So as we know, about two years ago, Amazon rolled out sponsored brand video. And that was a huge success. Really, across every metric, we saw improvements on click through rates, typically two to three times higher on sponsored brand videos than sponsored brand ads, on conversion rates, typically, you know, 10, to 20%, higher there. So we saw a lot of success. And I'd say really, those advertisers that took advantage of sponsored brand video in the first six months really even saw greater success. So I think this is going to be big, we know, you know, with more and more ad placements filling up at Amazon product detail pages, they all start kind of start to look the same. So video is really going to be that way for your brand to separate yourself from the page full of advertisements on Amazon. Typically, video advertisements on Amazon also take up much more space, you know, so typically a video ads about two or three times the size of like a regular sponsored product ad. So I think just in terms of engagement, and conversion rates, this is going to be big, especially if you pair this with that credit or reward programme we just discussed. Yeah. So definitely excited about that. And again, I mean, as with any Amazon programme, it's really those advertisers that get in there first. And they really have the biggest advantage for cost per click, as more and more advertisers start adopting, you know, these new ad sites, the cost per click start to go back up, but really in those first 3456 months, cost per click can be 15 25 30% cheaper than every other add type. There really that last piece here is going to be forecasting. So when you bought a times it can be a little bit difficult to forecast kind of, you know, if you don't have external tools outside of the ad console to kind of forecast how much you can spend on a set of keywords, maybe a contextual targeting group, maybe retargeting so with this new forecasting pulled directly in the ad console. When you put in your kind of target groups or your competitor ASINs you're going to target with this ad campaign on sponsored display. Amazon is now going to give you kind of a forecast, which is going to kind of project how much you could spend. So if you put in there, you know $100 Day budget. Amazon will call that out and be like hey, for this group your time argue that you could actually spend $200 A day $300 A day. And that will allow you to make more kind of dynamic changes, instead of kind of running a campaign for a week or two and then realising, you know, you're consistently running out of budgets for the audience.

David Liggins II  15:17

I think Johnathon, question for him, we're gonna step in here. I'm gonna ask Aaron as a question from the audience here. And when you're talking about these new promotional strategies here, and you know, the video when he's placements. So I remember back in the day advertising on Amazon, when coupons just came out, you got that nice little orange banner or cube con coupon there either percentage off or $1? Amount, for example? Is there anything in a new promotional strategy? Here are the videos that that could be greater visibility or people, right? Because we know that those those key those flags, for example, increased visibility, which includes click through, for example, and then also some conversion? Yeah, you see some of those features here. But those new promotional strategies, also videos that they've implemented here?

Johnathon Braga  15:57

Yeah, absolutely. So within the actual sponsor display ad, there will be a call out that really kind of calls out, you know, what, what the discount or the credit is going to be given for that product. So yeah, it will definitely kind of make your sponsored display ads kind of stand out. And we'll have that extra word is built in there to make sure you're getting that extra traffic and volume, why that promotion is running?

David Liggins II  16:22

Absolutely. So when we when we think about optimizing these things, also, we should see an improvement, potentially an improvement here, when they click through, thus driving more traffic to those relevant detail pages, and then potentially converting those customers, which, again, stands at Amazon's firewall to kind of get you a ranking and things of that nature, right?

Johnathon Braga  16:39

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're gonna typically with I think, increased ad, spend and reward promotion in place, you're gonna start to see that sales velocity pickup. And that's really going to help start to improve your organic break, especially if you're in a price sensitive category, you know, where some of those other competitors aren't taking advantage of, you know, some of these new tools.

David Liggins II  17:00

Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you, man. Appreciate, though, of course. Do we have any questions here before we move on to the next slide?

Aaron Conant  17:08

No, I don't have any but just a reminder, if you do if people do have questions or on anything, you know, Amazon related or unboxed or you know, paid media, whatever it is, drop them in the chat with a q&a, we'll get them answered.

Johnathon Braga  17:18

Absolutely. Now, DSP was really kind of the next big storyline across the unbossed. There's a series of different updates, that's really just going to make optimizing and taking advantage of Amazon's programmatic platform. Really worth it for the upcoming year. One of the first big roll out was digital signage, as does we know Amazon's really increasing kind of their brick and mortar space with Amazon Go with whole foods. So within these stores, they actually have you know, screen kind of screens in different places. So with this, you can actually start to target shoppers utilising these digital signs within Amazon physical stores, across Whole Foods and Amazon Go and again, all the same audiences are going to be available that are available on the DSP side, you know, contextual targeting behaviour targeting, retargeting loyalty, cross selling. So Amazon picks up, you know, when someone's walking into an Amazon Go store, Amazon picked up that customer's profile. And so you can target shoppers within that physical store. You know, just based on some of the categories, those customers that are shopping at the store at that time fall in, it's pretty exciting, especially if you're in the consumer grocery space are the CPG you know, kind of supplements based on you can get in front of the customers while they're in the store. Really, the other next big update was just an update to their pixel. They're switching from an img pixel to a J S, pixel artificially and simple terms. What this means is placing pixels and tracking events on your DSP website is going to become a lot easier. In the past, if you wanted to track you know, essentially how much traffic is seeing your DSP out on Amazon. And then actually going and making a purchase on your direct to consumer website, you'd have to place a pixel on the homepage, you'd have to place a pixel on the thank you page after they make the purchase. And then on any other page where you wanted kind of traffic picked up through that could be a little bit complicated at times, especially depending on how a website was tracked. But with this new Pixel, you'll essentially just have to place one pixel on the website and it will track all those different events. And again, the value in placing a pixel is really just kind of cross retailer data. So again, we see typically when running a DSP campaign across most of our brands, we see about 20 to 30% of that traffic actually leaves Amazon after seeing that DSPS and goes back to the DTC website and actually make the purchase there. You Are these at the prices cheaper on the CDC website? So really kind of seeing how that traffic moving back and forth, can really help you understand what your true realises from Amazon DSP,

Aaron Conant  20:12

which I think is really neat from the standpoint of a lot of people, I think, forget that. Amazon built this so that they could drive. You know, when brands are really concerned about Amazon, eating up all the direct to consumer site and brand direct to consumer, you know, brands, right, Hey, should I drive traffic? Should I mess around with Amazon and they opened this up to say you can actually drive to your direct to consumer site, a lot of huge disruptions a huge disappointment. It was it was disappointing, the complexity of building out the pixel and getting attribution. Yeah, I think this is the thing that a lot of people will like, because people do want to drive back. They want to own the customer.

Johnathon Braga  20:49

Yeah, absolutely. And it also opens up a lot of opportunities in terms of DSP audiences, that once you have a couple months of that pixel traffic, you can start to utilize some custom audiences off that so you can build a look alike pixel audience, that Amazon is going to find common traces of people that purchase on your DTC website. And it's going to create a look alike audience based off that typically, we see for very high returns for you can also take that pixel audience and everyone that buys something on your website, you can exclude them from your Amazon DSP campaigns on Amazon. So you can really make sure when someone does make a purchase, whether it's on Amazon, or your DTC website, you're excluding them from all, you know, future kind of mid and upper funnel campaigns.

Scott Miller  21:38

Something, something else I wanted to point out with a lot of that traffic going back to the DTC website, of course, Amazon sees that they're going to try to capitalize on it. And they have, you know, they're building up their buy with prime option that you can put on your DTC website. We're a preferred partner for that. So if anyone needs any help with that, or has any questions, please do reach out. And we can discuss that. Maybe in a later even in a later webinar like this.

Johnathon Braga  22:08

Yeah, absolutely. Great. Call out Scott.

David Liggins II  22:10

And, Johnathon, quick question for you. Maybe you can educate me also in the audience here, when you're talking about seasoning that pixel if you will. Can you talk a little bit about you know, that I ran into a situation also where we're talking about Whole Foods marketing, or marketing or Whole Foods? Exactly how you saying that there? But what type of granularity can you get with some of the targeting, geo targeting? Or could audience specificity there when you're talking about targeting these specific displays in these whole foods, whole foods, demographics there? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Johnathon Braga  22:37

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're going to be able to get really granular with your targeting. As we know, we can kind of layer on or exclude multiple audiences across different campaigns, whether you're targeting digital signage, or DSP audiences. So Amazon has a number of options, you know, that range from going down all the way down to the zip code level, and targeting very specific zip codes, income, you know, gender, there's a lot of different options. And again, we can layer those on top of more broader audiences, you know, like in market for apparel, or in market for men's apparel. So we can start to kind of layer on multiple steps to kind of create that perfect audience. And then we can also create exclusion audiences. So if we want to exclude you know, anyone that viewed your brand product, detail pages over the last 90 days, or exclude anyone that's made a purchase from you, in the last six months, we can create those exclusions to make sure you know, we're not spending impression dollars on customers that are already familiar with your brand or have already made that purchase. Then jumping into kind of the next update here, this is going to be similar to one of the tools on sponsor display, but a reach planning school for annual forecasts. So they made some updates here as well, where essentially, when you're building a campaign, you're going to be able to see, you know, kind of what that estimated spend over the coming week coming month is, and again, that's just going to help with planning. A lot of times in the past, it's been a little bit of a challenge, when you create a very granular custom audience, that you want to target everyone that's used your product over the past 30 days, but hasn't yet purchased that product, a custom audience, we don't see the size of it. So with this reach planning tool, we'll be able to kind of forecast to project how much spends available over a set period of time. So can be a pretty fundamental and just kind of future planning there. And then, in terms of the Creative Management API, this is really going to allow advertisers that kind of roll out their DSP campaigns into an API third party API to manage their creative from an API. So an API would be like, can choose sky PAC to you one of those third party tools that allows you to kind of manage and optimize campaigns that are more you know, in a third party dashboard Word wishes typically a lot more effective. But in the past, a lot of those API's weren't very friendly with Amazon DSPs. So with this, we can now do create a management, and a third party API, which is pretty exciting. And then really, that last update here is just updates on kind of Amazon targeting persona builder and new audience tools. So one of the new audience tools that Amazon rolled out is contextual targeting. So in the past, primarily, the primary different targeting options on Amazon DSP, with behaviour targeting, so you're kind of targeting shoppers based on past purchase history, you know what product they were viewing, but with contextual targeting, we can help target shoppers based off of kind of the site they're currently on. So someone's got a recipe website with contextual audience targeting, we could put like a dishware ad on that recipe site. So we already started doing some testing there with this new rollout and are actually seeing really strong results there. So I think it's going to become kind of a bigger part of what Amazon is doing with their audiences there. They also want a persona builder. So that's really going to help with building out kind of, you know, your ideal persona or for your kind of Amazon shopper. For the new updates. They're just across their audience tools on the Amazon demand side platform. Any other questions there?

Aaron Conant  26:30

No, I think people are just soaking this in. Literally, I mean, everybody who was at inbox was just like, there's just so much here, that I can't sift through all the words, and then the follow up. And I know, this is just a great deep dive follow up. But it's, it's awesome. Yeah. So I just saw you put up the next slide. The stream I'm about Yeah,

David Liggins II  26:53

absolutely. I mean, I noticed there's a lot of information here and a lot of valuable information, you know, these things can get really complex, you know, and that's why, you know, you have teams that kind of specialised with their expertise and kind of making this simple and building out these strategies for you, right, there's so much to pay attention to and to look at is literally a full time job, just kind of just understanding what these tools can do for your business. But when you implement them in the right way, that's when you really start to kind of leverage your growth, right. So we see it from DSP, we see it from sponsor display, right, so we're again, talking about that bottoms up approach, we're getting it more granular at the purchase decision, and kind of moving it up the funnel. And once you start leveraging all these pieces in an efficient manner, that's when you're really going to start to kind of take over that ecosystem.

Scott Miller  27:33

So yeah, we're going to take over and give Johnathon a little bit of break here has been talking for far too long. This is a little bit we call this day parting. This is just another way to, you know, get better, more specific data about impressions, clicks, cost, etc. And so you can get hourly insights, this comes directly from Amazon. And you're getting faster notification of this, because you can get this at any point of the day. And so you can almost have real time optimization, where you can see, hey, this is what's happening in the morning, people are, you know, depending on what product you have, it's going to this graph is going to look very different. There's a push based system, which just means that you can have this setup to run so that you can turn campaigns on and off, you can adjust the spend, depending on the time of day, where you can really make the best use of your budget. And for depending on your budget, depending on the size of your company, it may make more sense to target areas where the spend, the cost per click is actually down a little. Or if you really want to just blow out the advertising, you can target only the only where the cost per click is a little bit higher. So these are the like insights that we use on a day to day basis to maximize the return on adspend for our clients, which really maximizes your total total advertising costs as well. There's a lot of different we can talk about this just this chart here on the right for a long time. But that's kind of the high level. Johnathon, is there anything here that you think that I missed?

Johnathon Braga  29:22

Yeah, I can jump in. Just in terms of Amazon rollouts over the past three or four years is probably one of the biggest rollouts actually rolled out about six months ago. But Amazon, again made a lot of updates here at unbox. But really, especially as dads are kind of heading into a time of economic uncertainty and you know, everyone's Of course, looking at their ad budgets, this is really going to be a big way to optimise your ad budget budgets and potentially shave off you know, 20 to 30% of your ad spend on a monthly basis. So a few things here you can see looking at that chart on the right that In this specific category, that cost per click, and this category starts out at $1.38, to start today, and then if you look, by the end of the day, it's $1, as well, that's because a lot of those competitor advertises their budgets are running out by three, four or five o'clock in the afternoon. So by looking at this data, you actually start to realize, well, advertising in the evening is a lot cheaper than advertising in the morning, because 12am, everyone's budget resets and everyone's advertising. So with that day party strategy that Scott said, we say, hey, let's turn off this campaign from 12am to 60 6am, when conversion rates of the lowest cost per click to the highest, and really make sure we have enough budget to our ad campaign is on, you know, at four or five 6pm In the afternoon, and cost per clicks are cheaper, and conversion rates are still relatively high, we can also do a bidding strategy. So if you don't want your campaigns completely off, during that, you know, three, four hours of the day, we can also reduce those bids by 50%. So we're at least not paying as expensive a cost per click, or we're paying for maybe a lower placement, you know, maybe not top of search, but a lower placement on the page of search results. So really fundamental. And again, I'd say right now only about three to 40% of advertisers across Amazon are utilising this data. So this is another thing if you can get in early, it's going to be a huge benefit. And a huge cost savings to your brand was still you know, spending enough to drive growth.

Aaron Conant  31:31

This is the this was the fix in a lot of people have been saying, for years now. They've been de partie de gating, whatever. But the reality is, Amazon was only releasing the data once a day. Right? So they are putting their stitching everything together and hopefully being somewhat accurate. But this actually, is the answer to that. Right?

Johnathon Braga  31:54

Yeah, yeah, it was really, yeah, I mean, de partie has been, like you said a thing for three or four years, but it was a lot of AV testing, kind of guessing and kind of hoping for the best results. You know, it is a little bit tough to AB test, because, you know, we tweak demand, and everything else is going to shift. So with this, you know, you really have kind of precise hour by hour data. You know, it's also big, because you can kind of look at events, events are obviously high, you know, like Prime Day, Black Friday, high cost per click, very expensive, you know, in theory, very expensive events. So with this, you can also kind of look at your, you know, trends over past events and kind of utilise that to really kind of, you know, solidify your Black Friday, Cyber Monday strategy.

Aaron Conant  32:41

Yeah, are there ways that people are using this? I mean, beyond that, as well?

Johnathon Braga  32:46

Yeah, I mean, there's a number of different ways you can look at it. So that data is also available on a day by day basis. So, you know, I mean, we've seen some trends, like in the children's furniture category, for example, you know, you have parents working during the week, on the weekend, you typically see a big spike, you know, and conversion rate and visibility. So you can also use it to really make sure you know, your budgets are set, and you're kind of have increased budgets on those days that are most impactful for your brand, you know, both on the hourly level and the daily level. And then jumping into the next big updates. There was really quite a few updates on the Amazon Marketing Cloud. Now kind of jump into this is probably going to be still pretty new tool from Amazon and Amazon still kind of rolling it out across the board. So again, not a lot of advertisers a utility wising this yet, so I'm gonna do a brief overview. It is really kind of few big pieces to what's coming with the Amazon Marketing Cloud or use cases for the Amazon Marketing cloud.

Aaron Conant  33:49

Yeah, can you give us an overview exactly what is Amazon Marketing Cloud? That'd be here. And maybe you're gonna do that as well. But it's still scratching their head?

Johnathon Braga  33:59

Yeah, essentially, it's a new measurement and analytics tool. It's almost kind of a dashboard of sorts, that's really going to be utilised to help customers understand two things, better understand attribution, and better measure, really kind of their advertising across the channel. The right now, most of Amazon's based off what we would call last touch rollouts, or last touch attribution. This means if brands are running a streaming TV campaign, a DSP campaign and a PPC campaign to pay to see a streaming TV ad, then they get retargeted by a DSP ad, then they go online, you know, search for the brand, click on that PPC ad, that PPC ads gonna get the credit because that's the last thing they clicked or they saw that DSP ad and that streaming TV ads not going to get any credit for that sale or do vice versa. You know, they click on a PPC ads and they see a DSP ad and they click on the DSP that DSP is getting in the car. But none of that PPC ad is getting the credit. So what Amazon Marketing Cloud is going to do is really start to give brands weighted attribution. So it's going to almost kind of divvy up that sale across, you know, weighted kind of weighted attribution. So each piece that those customers saw, you know, gets a little bit of credit for that sale, it's also going to allow customers or brands to see kind of that path to purchase. So, you know, for some brands, a customer needs to see, you know, there's a longer consideration period. And so a customer needs four, or five, six touch points to make that sale, but some categories, you know, they're only having one or two. And so with this app, the purchase, you're gonna be able to see, you know, customer saw this ad on this day, a customer saw this data this day, and then it was really that third touch point that made them the sale. So really, it's gonna allow you to see and kind of double down, you know, on what's working, and really kind of what, what that advertising funnel should be for that specific brand. And so the other piece of this is really kind of understanding customer data a bit better. So I know, you're gonna be able to kind of see customer profiles, and attributes, I mean, again, you're not gonna be able to see like specifics like customer names, addresses or anything like that, but attributes of your customers. So you know, if there's a certain kind of segment within your customer that's starting to stand out, Amazon's going to show you that recommendation through Amazon Marketing club. One of the big roll out here to at kind of unbox was Amazon's gonna give you more actionable insights. So in the past, this data has been, you know, you really had to kind of get into it that to dissect it. So the whole goal with the rollouts unbox was to give you more actionable insights. And they're also going to allow you to start building DSP audiences directly from AMC based off kind of some of those customer profile attributes that you're seeing in the AMC. So just a reminder standing at how they discussed it at at unbox, this is going to be something that really kind of pushing to all advertisers over the next 12 months really makes sure where you almost get like a slap on the wrist, if you're not utilizing it just because this is really going to become the focus for Amazon in the future how you know, advertising data is managed and read.

David Liggins II  37:15

You know, Johnathon, this is huge, because one of the biggest keys here, unless you're really into no really in the know, are really advanced when it comes to your advertising strategy and execution, you can make bad decisions based on the data that you receive. Because a lot of these things, a lot of that, like, for example, if you go with your sponsor brands and other advertising tools that might not have the immediate conversion or results that you see, like a sponsor display, for example, you can make to say that, Oh, it's not, it's not really contributing to my brand, or there's not a legitimate comes to brand or seeing this particular ad, and you may want to turn it off or reduced budget, but because of how that attribution was accounted for, you can be making bad decisions on data that you don't truly understand because of how many different things they may have clicked in order in that customer journey to make that purchase decision. So I've seen that time and time again, where it's like, I don't, I don't think this is working. And then they shut it off. And then all of a sudden, they see sales tank, and they're like, wait, maybe this was actually contributing to the sales that I was getting in my velocity, etc, in the overall strategy. So this is really critical to be able to at least start to get a little bit more insight on where that customer journey is and how they're interacting with all the ad placements as you start to get this full funnel advertising strategy in place.

Johnathon Braga  38:32

Yeah, absolutely great. Paul, across the board. And, like you said, I mean, as it is, right now, again, last touch attribution, it really, everything's optimised in most cases, from an efficiency standpoint. And so when you're not seeing those multiple attribution, touchpoints, you turn off something that you think might not be working 100% You can lose out on sales there. So this is really going to help with that. And really, the focus of this is, you know, how of my advertising channels across the board helping with our top line sales, not just giving me a good rollout number, you know, on this whole particular campaign,

Aaron Conant  39:10

And a quick question comes in how are they weighing the channels that are having an impact? How do they know if first touch or last touch was most impactful? Or do we even know yet?

Johnathon Braga  39:20

Yeah. So it's going to be it really is going to be dependent kind of on the spend across your different channels and how many touch points that customer had, you know, with a channel of course, if you know, they saw one ad from streaming TV, one DSP, one PVC, it's going to be a pretty pretty even weighed, you know, distributed pretty evenly. But if they got multiple touch points, you know, from one ad type, there's going to be a little bit more weight there. And then also, there's always going to be a little bit more weight really on that last touch, as well. they'll really just going to be depending on the multiple touchpoints, across each kind of advertising channel.

David Liggins II  40:07

I'm curious, Johnathon, do you think this is something that Amazon will be able to give a little bit more insight into in the future, because, for example, we know when we talked about the customer journey, and where they are in that purchase decision, for it to be just brand awareness or actually trying to convert on that day, for example, sponsor display has different metrics, different click through rates and different conversion metric versus a US sponsored brand video or a sponsored brand banner, for example, or even sponsored display, for example, right? We know that these engagement metrics are different from these impressions are very different, right? And so it's not apples to apples, because one per se, like, Well, my click through here is like, you know, three, five, and on this one, it's only 1.5%, for example, and there's a different advertising placements within those particular advertising Levers as well. So, again, it's really complex, it gets really convoluted very quickly, do you think that we'll be able to get a little bit more insight and more structure in the way that we're building these things out? Based on just Amazon Marketing Cloud and attributes and metrics here?

Johnathon Braga  41:13

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, I think, right now, when we're kind of, you know, across Amazon, you know, when launch, when testing out different keywords, you know, in different audiences, you know, there's a lot of testing and learning going on, where with the Amazon Marketing Cloud, gonna give you very, you know, actionable audiences to target right now, you know, just kind of based off your different audiences. So I think it's gonna be really powerful. And again, this, you know, this is still fairly new in the Amazon ecosystem. So and it's, you know, that's part of what the updates was to make this more accessible. You know, without a third party API, you know, six months ago, the AMC getting the data was very hard, where, with some of these new roll outs and updates, you know, within the next few months, it's going to be very actionable and easy for, you know, almost every brand on Amazon to kind of utilise the insights from the Amazon Marketing club. I'd say the other piece of this, that Amazon really rolled out, as unboxed is the organic side of things. So when they kick this off the Amazon Marketing Cloud is very focused on Amazon, you know, advertising, attribution, advertising, audiences, advertising metrics, but they really just added in the second piece of this. And that's really the organic side of things. So they're going to be offering a paid subscription model. And this is going to get you access to the AMC kind of retail analytics. So when you're looking at kind of your Subscribe and Save, you know, how many times the customer purchased before they actually subscribed, you know, where that organic traffic coming from? How many times did you know your organic shoppers your listing before they purchase? So there's really kind of the organic side of your business, that they're trying to get more visibility to the brands through Amazon Marketing Cloud as well. And that was rolled out to add unboxed. And then yeah, this just really kind of jumped into it. I mean, really, we covered this, but three benefits, you know, of the AMC, the biggest one is going to be improved planning, again, giving you actionable insights, you know, maybe right now, your DSP split DSP PPC split is at 20. You know, you're spending 80% on PPC 20% on DSP, you know, because you're seeing the better rollout is there. But with this, if you can really see what's driving that sale in that traffic, you might move that switch, you know, move to make a switch where you're maybe at a 6040 split, and then that second thing, keep creating new audiences. Again, when you go to the DSP court portal, Amazon has 1000s of pre built audiences, you know, and then at any given category, there's hundreds of audiences that could relate to your product or your brand, you know, so it can be a bit overwhelming at times. So this can really help help you find which DSP audiences are perfect and relate most closely to, you know, customers that are currently purchasing your products on Amazon. And then lastly, greater insights on measurement. Again, that kind of relates back to attribution and really kind of figuring out how many touch points there were prior to that customer making that purchase. And then this is really just kind of going back to, you know, kind of how all these different pieces kind of fit into the puzzle as a whole. So this is what we consider the Amazon advertising funnel is very specific to Amazon. Typically, when building a strategy on Amazon, we're typically kind of starting from the ground up and building up to awareness. So your loyalty campaigns are going to be your brand new keywords, really protecting your brand and space from competitors showing up there. Making sure you're the first day you know at the top of search when someone's searching for your brand This is also retargeting. So, you know, anytime someone comes to your product detail page doesn't make a purchase, we want to get back in front of that customer because we know they're very interested and highly likely to make a purchase. That's just the low hanging fruit there. So we're going to work our way up to purchase. And that's when we kind of start getting into cross selling. Just so you know, we can put a sponsor display ad, you know, if you're selling beds, we can put a sponsor display ad on that bed that shows off your nightstand or dresser, your kind of complementary products, we can also do that with DSP, where we're kind of cross selling, you know, if you're selling sheets, maybe you want to sell the pillow with that, honestly, kind of getting the full assortment of your products, then you really kind of move up to consideration. And that's really when you're going after those category keywords. So you know, if you're in the vitamin category, maybe you're bidding up from the keyword vitamin K or vitamin D, you know, and then in terms of DSP, that's when you're going after kind of those larger end market segments. So Amazon has these pre built segments, you know, with hundreds of 1000s of shoppers in them based on their shopping habits. So we can find someone and show them a display at you know, if they're in market for supplements based on that prebuilt audience, and then you really kind of get into the awareness phase. And really, that's the last piece we're kind of really want to fully spend and optimise on loyalty versus consideration before kind of adding in that last layer. And that's typically that's going to be your streaming TD, that's maybe going to be going after a complimentary Category or Category that's congruent to your category, but not quite, you know, what you typically identify your your product being in. And that's really, you know, as you move up the funnel, kind of the metrics are looking at really starting to change to at the bottom there, we're really kind of looking at realise and ad sales, and organic rank, really as kind of those top drivers. Whereas we kind of moved to the top of the funnel and awareness and consideration, we really start to gauge the success of those types of campaigns by click through rate, branded searches. And again, that's typically when you see a longer really kind of consideration period. So that's really kind of going back to the marketing cloud, where that's going to come into play. Because if someone sees your ad and doesn't purchase within that 14 day window, they may fall out of that attribution window that Amazon sets. So with the marketing cloud, we're going to be able to see some of those sales that maybe didn't get attributed to that 14 day window there.

David Liggins II  47:31

That's awesome, man. Thank you. Um, I know we're getting close to time here. And I I know we want to leave a little bit of time here for questions. So let's see what we have next here. And maybe we can kind of feel some questions or maybe just talk about how we best implement these strategies here. I'm guessing that right right on cue here, I'm building this success on future on Amazon here. So if we could talk a little bit about this organic first strategy. And we could talk about, you know, how we would miss implement this to kind of help grow your brand.

Aaron Conant  47:59

Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, I think we have all these tools, all this new stuff, we'd love to hear how you guys look at implementing it.

Scott Miller  48:07

So I just want to say this is kind of a brief summary of everything we just spoke through, I would just want to give a quick recap, since we are short on time, going back to the beginning, as Johnathon pointed out, now's the time to invest as other brands are pulling their dollars back, it's becoming a little bit less expensive, and the cost per click. And that's how you improve your organic rank and pays visibility. So I'm making that investment ahead of time, so that you can build your ranking up in the Amazon ecosystem. And that bottoms up approach is really how our entire team looks at it. And we approach we apply a strategy bottoms up not just for advertising, but we focus on it through your content through your promotional strategies, marketing. And we have to make sure you have the right number of promoted products, less is more. So we do that by putting you know, varying different products like products in the same detail page, getting those products in front of your consumers eyes without actually having to spend on it. But I do want to call it one thing that I don't think we we've talked about, we did say more information can definitely make everything a little bit more complex. But one of the major call outs that I pulled from Amazon and box was Amazon recommends all brands to be working with an agency in some sort of capacity, because everything is so complex. And Amazon actually filters a lot of this information through the agencies. They, you know, they their team is large and strong and advertising but it's much more simple for them to filter it through agencies, and then they can give all that information to the brands. But you know, that's I just feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that piece. Were there any any questions, anything about this slide or anything we've talked about today?

Aaron Conant  50:06

I mean, I don't I don't have those that have come through. But you know, afterwards, I think a lot of people are gonna digest all of this. And you know, what I would say is, as we come up on time here, and David, I want to give it to you for like key takeaways is yeah, the team over Media.Monks have been great friends, partners, supporters, the network for years now and 100% worth of follow up conversation to learn more pick their brains of what's going on how to win on Amazon. They're all around great people and experts on the platform. So yeah, and there's a thing is like, good content, just dense to digest. I completely agree. That's, I mean, I'm sitting here doing the same thing, which is, I was at unboxed. And I just, you know, you know, thank you team here, Johnathon, Scott, and David for kind of consolidating all the gibberish into hey, here's the here's the key takeaways. But I'll give it to you to kind of wrap us up here.

David Liggins II  51:04

Absolutely. And you know, and one thing, thank you for that, Aaron. And one thing I do want to say is when, when I'm speaking to our partners, and you know, other, you know, prospects who are looking to kind of partner with us, when we're talking about this organic first advertising strategy, or this approach to your business in general, I try to simplify it in this manner. And this is, seems to hit home Well, right. Amazon is, there's a simple formula, but it's extremely difficult to execute, right? In order to get growth and perform on Amazon, there's got a couple pieces here, it's going to be your your traffic, times your conversion is equal to your revenue, your growth, your sales, okay? And there's only a few ways for you to build that traffic, okay, you're going to be driving your own traffic, you're gonna be paying for traffic, or you're gonna have organic traffic on Amazon. And which a conversion piece is going to come down to your content, it could come down to what badges is it best sellers are the image choice, Amazon's choice badges, your organic rank impacts your conversion, obviously, the content on a page impacts your conversion. So when you're talking about driving these traffic and converting to grow your brand, these are all the levers that you can leverage to really hone in on one getting that traffic up to converting that particular traffic and, and driving growth to your brand. So it's a simple formula, extremely difficult to execute. And that's why you have you know, teams and people who are experts in these particular fields, so we can hone in on that particular strategy for you. Right. So I hope that hopefully that simplifies that a little bit on you know, what drives success? I mean, it's really that simple. It really quick.

Aaron Conant  52:33

Last minute question comes in what high level KPIs do you use when driving towards the organic first mindset?

Johnathon Braga  52:40

Yeah, yeah, I can No

Aaron Conant  52:43

32nd guessing

Johnathon Braga  52:47

I can jump in there. Yeah, we actually have a in house tool that we use to kind of track organic rank. So across all a brand keywords. So we'll we kind of break it into three segments, first page keywords, second page keywords, and above the fold keywords. Above the fold. Keywords are typically the keywords that are showing up in those first two rows of search results. And again, that's really where we want to be because we know most shoppers aren't scrolling past those first three or more rows. So we can see, you know, you have 200 keywords on page one 100 On page two, and we can track those on a week over week basis and kind of see on a percentage shift how much we're growing your page, one organic visibility across category as a whole, we can also isolate those keywords so we can do you know from the time we start working with you, we can kind of isolate keywords on an individual basis. You know, right now you're ranking 20 on page one, three months from now, you know, you're up to eight on page one, and we can kind of isolate that on a keyword by keyword basis. We're also looking at organic sales across the brand. So once you know a strategy implemented over a 5678 month period, we want to see kind of those organic lands use on those organic sales start to climb from the you know organic placement training as well. As part of the strategy to is off to the number of Amazon choice badges and bestseller badges we we can you know acquire, we worked for several brands, you know where we start with maybe two, three Amazon choice badges across their catalogue and within a few months, you know, we get them up to 10 or 15. And as we know, once you get an Amazon choice badge on your product, you know, typically you see traffic and conversion rates jump up by 20 to 30%. So we're really kind of looking at a number of metrics as the success of this brand. And really kind of staying away from rollouts is kind of the main key metric for success here.

Aaron Conant  54:42

Awesome. Well as we get right to the end here, again, you know, thanks team for jumping on today. Again, I encourage anybody if you're looking for more information or you need help in this space, reach out to the Media.Monks team. They've been great friends, partner supporters for years now. And with that, we're going to wrap it up right on time here. Hope everybody has a fantastic Wednesday everybody. Take care Stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event. Alrighty.