63. Daniel Tejada: Creating A+ Content That Drives Amazon Growth
Tired of seeing poor conversion rates on your Amazon listing that is slowing sales and driving PPC costs up?
Don’t worry, we’ve got the solution you need in this exciting new episode of the Brand Builder Show!
Our special guest, Daniel Tejada from Straight Up Growth, will reveal the secrets behind Amazon A+ Content and how it can revolutionize your Amazon listings.
Together, we’ll dive deep into how optimizing your A+ content can lead to improved conversion rates, turning casual browsers into loyal customers.
Daniel will also guide you through conducting research that uncovers the secret sauce for creating high-performing listings.
Plus, we’ll explore how listing images and A+ content work in harmony to grab attention and boost sales.
Don’t miss this insightful episode that will help you rise above the competition and take your Amazon sales to new heights!
Episode Links
- Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn
- Check out Straight Up Growth
Talking Points
00:00 Introduction to Guest: Daniel Tejada
01:14 Background of Daniel
02:26 Daniel’s favorite five
06:44 PPC Strategy and how it has changed over the years
11:03 A Plus content and its importance on Amazon
12:36 Mobile vs Desktop optimization for A Plus content
14:57 Research process for A Plus content and brand analytics
17:55 Competitor comparisons
19:47 Listing images and conversion rate
21:08 Tips on mobile friendliness and inspiration brands
23:58 Successful Amazon advertising strategy in 2023 and campaign strategies
28:57 Future of PPC
30:58 Tips for Amazon sellers
31:45 PPC Tools vs Manual
32:30 Where to find Daniel
Hey, welcome back to another episode of The Brand Builder show. Today’s episode is going to be a another high quality episode bringing you loads of actionable information. And the topic today is A plus content and generally conversion and bringing people to your listing and getting them to buy when they’re on there when you’re selling on Amazon FBA. And to help us cover this topic. We’ve got Daniel on the show today, Daniel, thanks for coming on. Thanks for joining us.
Daniel Tejada
Thanks for having me here today. Super excited to chat through how we can rent on Amazon.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, me too, man. Me too. It’s obviously a big topic, a crucial topic, which I’m excited to dive into and hear your thoughts on. Before we do that. Let us know a bit about your background, what you’ve been up to, over recent times. And you know, how you got on to get this knowledge and experience in this industry that you have?
Daniel Tejada
Yeah, so I actually started in 2016, specifically working in a company called Quiver, where I manage the advertising. I was the advertising program when we started, then we very quickly, you know, I’d spent what was it $7 million, my first two years of PPC at five cent CPC. So there’s a lot of ad spend back then. Yeah, since then, I’ve sold over $2 billion with a product and Amazon, I now run an agency called straight up growth, where we manage about 50 million a year and spend about half a billion a year in sales on the platform.
Ben Donovan
Nice. That’s awesome, man. Yeah, it’s a lot a wealth of experience there. And as we said, you know, lots of lots of traffic that you’re driving but there are some key things that need to be in place when you’re going to drive that amount of traffic. So looking forward to diving into those things and and pulling out some some gold in there. But before we do dive into it, our lightning round of questions, favorite five, we call it so your favorite of each of these sort of business topics. So don’t need to like give us loads of context, but just give us a little bit that we can go away and research and it can inspire some some brand owners. So firstly, do you have a favorite ecommerce brand?
Daniel Tejada
I really like Goli they do. So I’m an Amazon nerd. And I really love how they launch products on Amazon. They use some traditional media like TV radio, really blow up rated volume and then they hit the traditional like, Amazon Levers as well. And they launch items faster than anybody I know. So it’s always fun.
Ben Donovan
Do you say Goli?
Daniel Tejada
Goli? Yep. They make vitamins. Like if you look up like apple cider vinegar on Amazon, you’ll see hundreds of 1000s of reviews on their
Ben Donovan
so it’s G-O-L-I is it?
Daniel Tejada
I think it’s G O L I
Ben Donovan
Nice, nice. Cool. All right, I like it. It’s like one clever way to get a trademark or name is like just make up a random name. Maybe it means something I don’t know. But
Daniel Tejada
I’m sure it means something. But really, it’s a very expensive brand person who figured it out. So yeah, absolutely.
Ben Donovan
Cool. All right. What about favorite software or tool that helps you run your business?
Daniel Tejada
Man, I love Google calendar so much. There. It’s like my lifeblood I keep it public for you know, I’ve got 30 folks on my team. And so it’s it’s helpful to schedule things and stuff like that. We still use Calendly and other things. But Google Calendar is like my my Bible.
Ben Donovan
Nice. Nice. Yeah. Have you checked out the off topic? But have you checked out the Google Calendar Calendly killer, they call it you know, you can schedule with?
Daniel Tejada
So we actually before this phone call, I was working on the combination itself as well. So yeah, I’m about to start the integration. I’m pretty excited about that.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, cool. Good stuff. Cool. All right. And what about your favorite organic marketing channel?
Daniel Tejada
Probably tied between TikTok and Amazon, I’d say probably TikTok right now, just because the organic reach is crazy. Also LinkedIn, I love I mean, for my business specifically, it’s an amazing channel as well. The organic reach is really, really massive. They’re not really super paid channels right now.
Ben Donovan
Yeah. If you could predict TikTok’s organic reach staying as it is, how long do you think there’ll be for.
Daniel Tejada
So the organic reach is why they have such strong engagement. Right now. There’s plenty of ad dollars going in the I think really the only risk on when it becomes more of like meta where it’s spilled stuffed with ads is when they get acquired, which is going to happen I’m sure within five years or so like one of the social companies is going to have to buy them or they’re gonna start losing market share, which is already actually starting to happen in terms of search
Ben Donovan
Yeah. Okay, so many questions. I want to ask on that. But we’ll try and stay focused. What about a paid marketing channel?
Daniel Tejada
Amazon, Amazon is my favorite channel in the whole world. It’s the only channel that your paid advertisement can directly impact your organic sales as well. Yep,
Ben Donovan
absolutely. It’s pretty good. And what our favorite business book if you haven’t,
Daniel Tejada
I like the lean startup that was super helpful. I like doing and not just prepping. I think some people it’s like paralysis through over analysis, versus just actually getting shit done. Yeah,
Ben Donovan
absolutely. Absolutely. That’s been my one of my biggest frustrations is trying to wait. So everything’s perfect before you get moving forward. But you got to get moving.
Daniel Tejada
You got to get moving more things are on fire sometimes.
Ben Donovan
Absolutely, absolutely. Good stuff, I thank you for that. It’s good for our audience, just to get to know you a bit more and be inspired to go and research a few things. So they will definitely be doing that I am sure. We talked obviously, about how you have driven a lot of traffic, you know, insane amounts of traffic really. And so it would be tempting then to talk about how you’ve done that. And PPC, which we can get on to a little bit later. But one of your other areas of expertise is the Amazon listing itself. And I would imagine without wanting to put words in your mouth, it’s kind of hard to become that because, you know, when you drive traffic to a listing, it’s not a silver bullet, that’s going to make you loads of money automatically, maybe five, six years ago, when you could, you know, run 10% A cos on an automatic campaign. Crazy kind of numbers, but now you have to have an optimized listing. And so firstly, you know, speak to that topic a little bit. And then we’re gonna really talk about a plus content and how that can really drive more conversions for you. How has PPC changed over the years?
Daniel Tejada
Yeah, great question. So, you know, one of the simplest things right measurements that I like to use, when I first started doing Amazon ads in 2016, Amazon did 550 million in ad revenue. Right? So PPCs, were five cents a click, you know, there wasn’t really much competition, driving, you know, efficiency didn’t really matter that much, because it was so cheap just to get clicks in general. Last year, Amazon did $37 billion in ad revenue, right? And so the competitiveness of the of the advertising has increased spectacularly, right. And that’s where why advertising efficiency becomes so important. You know, if you’re launching a supplement, and your net new, your starting CPC is 10 to $15, a click, and your average order value is probably less than 90-99. Right? So just mathematically, like getting a 10% A cos is isn’t even possible with a 50% AD conversion rate, you know, in that in that methodology, so you have to have more strategy behind it. For sure, just because of the cost alone of PPC.
Daniel Tejada
But the secondary pieces, and why this listing component becomes so important is if it’s expensive to acquire those customers, especially if you’re net new, why not give yourself the highest chance of those dollars actually converting right? If you’re driving traffic to a non optimized listing, you have a you know, typically one to 4% lower conversion rate than you would if you’re just running basic optimizations on your listing itself. And that adds up right, the more dollars you spend, the bigger the impact of actually doing. Like some some conversion optimization to your listing becomes seen.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, definitely. As a rule, are you with new clients or existing clients that you take on your overall PPC strategy? Is it trying to turn a profit on the first sale still, or have you completely move to driving organic rank.
Daniel Tejada
So it’s usually a combination, right, and really comes down to the brand goals, you know, I’ve got brands that have huge dollars, right, I’ve got a brand that wanted to be the number one item in the Kido category. That’s one where we really did focus on wanting to replenishable items. So we know that new customer acquisition is key, because they’re going to come back through the LTV. The secondary goal was the organic search volume on non branded terms is massive in that category. You know, keto was a sub 1000 most searched term on Amazon, every single month, during January, it’s a sub 400. We made it the first organic listing, we took the number one market share against that item. But that was you know, from a predictability, like, standpoint with the client, we built out a forecast where we don’t break even till month nine, right? In that model, right because of how fast they wanted to go. And that month nine was the first month we turned a profit right now we’re in year two, you know, we’re doing 90% of our revenue is organic sales, right? Like last month, I did $900,000 organically, you know, for that item. But it was predictable growth right now, not everyone has that luxury, right? There’s brands that we work with that, you know, need to stay somewhat profitable as they’re kind of building it out. And so that’s kind of where I go into a strategy of like, identify the terms that you can advertise on right now you do any item that’s net new, is going to have some ugly months when they first start just given the fact that ranking doesn’t happen unless you are getting clicks and orders on your search term. But when you build out your listing, you don’t start off on page one for the majority of search terms itself. 81% of clicks happen on page one of any search term on Amazon. So the buyer, the tricky part here is that you’re starting on page three, you’re not getting the visibility to get orders to rank. And so you need to have PPC running in order to start ranking in the first place. Right. But that’s where having a super optimized listing becomes really important, especially if you’re net new, you don’t have reviews, you know, cuz there’s not that trust that’s already built in. So your listing optimization becomes way more important, when you are net new, you know, compared to an item that already exists, and already has reviews, and it’s getting sales and things like that. Yeah,
Ben Donovan
yeah. And a plus content specifically, obviously, is a tool in the armoury of brand owners. What is it about a plus content that’s so important for brands on Amazon? Great question.
Daniel Tejada
So the simplest answer is the number of users that shop on Amazon, on desktop versus mobile, right, most of us were optimizing on our computers, when we’re building out our Amazon listings, you see your title, your bullet points, your product images are on the side A plus content, you have to scroll below the fold to really get to on mobile, which is where 80% of all clicks happen on Amazon. A plus content is super prominent, right? But you’re going to see is title, you’re gonna see product images, right above the fold, as soon as you scroll down, then you’re gonna actually run into a plus content, and then you hit bullet points last, right. So a plus content actually becomes way more valuable, just in the sense of how a user’s eye is looking while they’re actually shopping through Amazon. So that alone is massive. The other big piece is the flexibility it provides there, not only can you get images, but you can also change the format of how the listing looks right, you can call out your USP or unique selling points in a very interesting kind of pleasing way. And on top of that, you’ve got a plus premium that Amazon just opened up, which opens up even more options, you know, to really give that reason that customer reason to purchase your item there. Yeah.
Ben Donovan
Obviously, mobile optimization is massive for E commerce in general. Because of that reason, a plus content appearing higher is even more important, potentially on Amazon. So when you start working with a client, and you build out a plus content modules, are you building them just entirely with with mobile in mind? Is desktop even a consideration?
Daniel Tejada
I mean, we’re mobile first, right? So now, the way we build our wireframes, the optimization looks great on both fronts, right there. And there’s ways you can like, just general pro tip, right, Amazon gives you these widgets. But you can also add text directly, like in your image itself, right. And you can also start to build how you want your A plus content to look outside of Amazon’s traditional means, if you’re clever on the design front as well. So not only is it you know, you should keep mobile first, but there’s a way to do it where it looks good on both mobile and desktop, right? It’s fully optimized there. But multiverse is definitely the idea.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, definitely, definitely. So what does the perfect piece of A plus content look like? Because I’ve seen brands, and we’ve sort of tried to replicate it a bit in terms of a it’s almost like a continuous image, you know, and what, like what you said that some of the text is baked into the image. And on desktop, it looks amazing. But then you look on mobile is so much smaller. What does the what is an optimized piece of content look like? Are you using, you know, rows of images with text? Or does it product by product basis? Or do you have like a set format, you
Daniel Tejada
know, we’ve got a couple of wireframes that like seem to work really well for us, in general. But a lot of the time, it’s it’s just stacking images is like one of our favorite things to do. So the reason it looks so seamless is it’s not one giant image, it’ll be like five images, but they’re all sized exactly the same. And we can, we can do a couple things. One thing that we like to do is change it up with like, let’s say it’ll be blue here for the colorblock. And it’s white for colorblocked. And it’s like yellow there. So now each widget stands out, but it looks very cohesive, right? It looks like almost like an endless scroll page. Right? And that’s kind of very similar to what a lot of people do in general, right? If you look at Instagram or meta, if you look at TikTok, it’s literally like, swipe, how do I keep the same format going? It’ll be different content, but the format never changes, right? Usually between between swipe or whatever. And that’s kind of the same logic with a plus.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, because in terms of research going into a plus content, do you have a particular research process, you know, what needs to go into a plus content versus what needs to go into bullet points and main product images? Yeah, so
Daniel Tejada
we run actually a pretty robust analysis when we do Content optimization. We do things like scrape your product reviews, first, right, and we’ll pull out the good and the bad. If there’s any sort of consistencies, that might be something we want to address, if there’s something good, like, we’ll start to call out those features people really like so if it’s food, it might be like, Oh, it’s vegan, it’s cruelty free, it’s, you know, the packaging is sustainable, right, whatever some of those USPs are, but we’ll also pull out some of the bad sometimes as well, because sometimes that could be something as simple as they’re using it incorrectly, and you’re getting negative feedback for that. So a way to ensure that not ensure but reduce that negative feedback, put instructions on how to use directly in your A plus content, I’ve seen that be be fruitful.
Daniel Tejada
We also like to look at Brand analytics, brand Analytics gives you customer profile information. So you can see like demographic information, in terms of like, ages of your typical customers. And you can do this at an item level, or as a brand level, you could look at gender, you could look at college education. And so sometimes we factor that into some of the imagery as well, you know, if we might find out, it’s mainly older women that are purchasing our items, let’s use older women in our product imagery, right? If it’s, if it’s men, you know, a lot of men buying it, let’s use men in our images for that. So there’s definitely some of that, that we’re looking into. We typically also want to keep it on brand, right? Like brand is really important. At the end of the day, we don’t really sell commodities, we’re selling a brand at the end of the day, there. And so we’d like to keep that consistent with your.com with what you’re doing, you know, across the board. So usually working directly with a brand managers key to get that going. And then the usually two last steps would be keyword research. So we actually will look at the market and identify what are the search terms people are looking at. And including those terms in your content is great, right? Like if you are selling a protein bar, and you’re keto friendly, get keto friendly, in your text, right, you can get in your images, you can get in your A plus, right, it doesn’t just have to be in your bullet points, I find it actually is more fruitful being in your a plus and product images, and then competitor analysis. So usually what we’ll do is we’ll find where your competitors rank and where they have traffic and then try to go after some of those same search terms. So it’s definitely a methodical approach. It’s not just like, This looks good. It’s, this looks good. And we’re hitting ABC, you know, on our sponsor,
Ben Donovan
definitely has some great tips in there specifically, or especially the the data driven approach, you know, seeing what the data tells you and then shaping the content around that to really maximize that as a, I’m sure a tip that a lot of our listeners will take away and work on. Now given the amount of data that Amazon has started to give us which is really helpful. You mentioned there about competitors, competitor analysis, is competitor comparisons, something that you’ll do a lot of the time.
Daniel Tejada
Sometimes we’ll do comparison, a competitor comparison, like widget. Other times we’ll do like a cross promotion widget instead. So that’s usually one of one of the wireframes. Or two of the options. We do like the cross promo, especially if we have a catalog with with decent like associated products or things like that, that can be really fruitful. If you’re in a really competitive market. For let’s say that the item you’re really pushing from an ADS perspective, we can not push some of the other items. But because we have a comparison module, they will grow as our what I call our new customer acquisition product grows, the associated products grow too. So don’t definitely don’t sleep on the cross promotion. The comparison now can can definitely be fruitful, we usually will also hit comparison with like an actual product image. Sometimes we’ll create like our own, you know, us versus them type of comparison. And so if I do that, I don’t need to repeat it again, typically in the a plus, typically I’ll use the comparison module instead.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, yeah, one thing we started doing with those recently, which found has worked well as with the comparisons is saying, you know, like our product and then calling out the negative sort of maybe connotation, so like, cheap this, like our yoga mat, and then cheap yoga mats to almost sort of justify that higher price. And it seems to be working quite well.
Daniel Tejada
It does. No, it definitely does. And that’s another thing I know, we’re not talking about price. But Amazon doesn’t have to be a race to the bottom from a pricing perspective, too. Right? If you do the types of things you mentioned, you’re putting that high quality and you can you can get people to buy more expensive items, if you can justify it.
Ben Donovan
Definitely. In terms of just cold impact on conversion rate, I don’t know if it’s data you track in terms of a listing without any a plus and then you put a plus on it is obviously hard to completely sort of test that but what kind of conversion rate jump can someone expect?
Daniel Tejada
Generally I’ve seen anywhere from one to 4% improvement in conversion rate. There depends on the category, price point and things like that and how good the job is, but almost always you’ll see a big bump in your conversion rate for sure. See?
Ben Donovan
And just finishing up on just coming back to so the listing images, a plus, do you try and completely avoid any double up? Or will you double up because
Daniel Tejada
double up and really key points, right like stuff we want to push across, we’ll definitely double up there, we may try to present it in a slightly different format. So it’s not, you know, like, I don’t want to use the exact same image in my, in my product photos that I’m then going to put in my eight plus content if if I can’t, right, usually, there’s like a brand focused one, sometimes we’ll reuse those. But they’re also not size the same in the way that we typically size our images to like the the product, the images for the product detail page will be different than the images, we’re going to use size format wise in the a plus, because we use those banner, ones across the board and a plus. So because of that they don’t usually look the same. But we may definitely stress the same points for sure. Yeah, there’s things people love.
Ben Donovan
Yeah. And key USPSA. If there are those banner type ones, are there any tips you can give people for mobile friendliness? Big Tex obviously,
Daniel Tejada
yeah, like I’d say like from a mobile friendliness perspective, they resize really well. Once you have the sizing, like as long as your images are done, or being uploaded correctly, and you’re not having Amazon resize and improperly sized image, they’re going to show up great on a plus, as well as I’m sorry, they’re gonna show up great on desktop as well as mobile. I definitely recommend do your own text in your images versus using all of Amazon’s blockiness. Because that definitely can impact the look and feel of it. And you can keep your own fonts, you can have a lot more flexibility. And it just looks a lot more seamless for sure.
Ben Donovan
Have you got any brands that people can go look at their particular inspiration to you, you think you’re doing a really good job of this?
Daniel Tejada
Yeah, a couple brands. So on the sports supplement side of things, we have a brand called Performax. There they do like fat burning supplements. They’ve got some really good listings, we have a brand in the energy space called Pure Boost that has some really great listings. Also like this brain active acre. They do like haircare natural haircare products, they’ve got some really beautiful listings as well. Now we’ve got a whole bunch more, feel free to like, reach out to me on LinkedIn, if you’ve got questions. I’ve got like a list of like proper listings that I like to send to people.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, good, good. And then obviously, these highly optimized A plus content blocks will help a conversion rate on the listing. Are there any other benefits to specifically PPC, you driving a lot of traffic? Is there anything else that’s going to really benefit other than just conversion rate?
Daniel Tejada
Yeah, well, so if your AD conversion rate goes up, right, that typically is going to lead to your A costs going down. The reason your a cost goes down is because your wasted or non converting ad spend decreases, right? So ad efficiency essentially goes up. So conversion rates always king, it’s going to make obviously direct impact on that a costs. The other thing that it can impact is like from an organic ranking strategy, as your conversion rates get better. Now you’re driving more orders on those key search terms that you’re trying to rank on. And that means you can rank organically faster. So really, all of what we do is really centered around growing brands organically. And this is one of the most important steps to doing so right. You need to have enough traffic, but you need to have a high enough conversion rate to rank on these terms, as well. Right. I could spend, you know, 20,000-30,000 a month on a term if my conversion rates too low, I’m never going to rank against it. Right. So
Ben Donovan
yeah, definitely. Yeah. And then coming around to PPC, the obviously strategy, the landscape is changing so much as we’ve talked about, versus a few years ago. What does a successful Amazon advertising strategy look like? In 2023?
Daniel Tejada
Great question. So the first step, and I think a lot of people miss this is having a product level ad strategy versus a count level ad strategy right in the past that you could get away with, Okay, I’m gonna go for like a blended 10% A cost. But that doesn’t really mean much. Because your products are always in different stages of their, you know, Amazon journey as well, right? A well established item is going to have a low A cost because it already has organic visibility there and so your goals are going to be probably a little bit more robust focus. The problem is when you apply that strategy to a new item that you just launched, right, and you’re like, Well, I have a 10% a costs on Item A Item B should have a 10% a cost to write because why not? There, the gap is you don’t have any organic visibility, right? If you look at your sessions are going to be super low compared to the item that already has organic visibility. And because you’re trying to put the same strategy on, you know, on two different completely different items. Right, the second item will never be a success right there because you don’t have the right goals in mind.
Daniel Tejada
So, one start with a product by product level strategy, it’s gonna allow you to be really granular, and it’s gonna allow you to grow everything to the needs that you have, right. Second kind of thing I’ve been telling brands is less is more, you know, because Amazon PPC has gotten more expensive. That means every item that you launch or every parent listing, you have to have an ad budget for that, right. And so if you’ve got, let’s say, a $10,000 a month ad budget, and you’re launching more and more items, you can’t keep diluting that spend by moving it to the other items, right? Because what’s going to happen is your sales on your top seller are going to start to slow down because it doesn’t have the same number of orders it needs every single month. So it’s okay to not advertise every item in your catalog, right, as long as you’re giving the items that you are advertising enough spend to make a difference, right? Nothing is worse than spending $200-$300 a month on on a product that that’s not enough to move the needle on, right? So you’re just going to really be kind of wasting the dollars at that point.
Daniel Tejada
And then third, I’d say like add efficiency, right? A lot of, you know, I’ll probably do probably like 200 ad audits last year, one of the biggest themes I saw in probably 85 90% of the accounts is a high degree of wasted spent. And typically what that means is you’re not harvesting keywords out of research match types, your auto, your broad your phrase, you’re leaving them in there, and you’re becoming dependent on those match types that historically don’t convert on 30 to 60% of the spend. There, you’re looking at a high level, the way you drive down, or drive up the ad efficiency is by moving those terms from research into exact match types. So now more of your spend, you are directly controlling versus controlling buckets of keywords or an auto campaign in which you’re really not controlling very much at all. Yeah, yeah, that’ll help a lot.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, from a sort of top level view, I know it will take ages to go into a granular level. But campaign structure is a traditional model of lots of keywords in a research campaign, and then exact match in another campaign, are you getting very single
Daniel Tejada
that I’d say like, so we’re going to segment your branded versus non branded, should always be segmented, I’d say that that way, you can control the levers like we focus, typically 90% of our spend on non branded, but there are times when you want to like spike it up or drive it down, right. So that segmentation is important. We’re typically going to have like, you know, your basic research campaign, we’re going to have what we call like a performance campaign or exact match campaign on this, this is all for non branded, we’re gonna have sort of an auto. And then really, as those search terms are coming in, in real time, we’re harvesting Now we may start to create additional groupings, like it’s good to have a competitor segment can be fruitful. So you could drive that down, we do break out individual search terms, not for every term, but specific ones that we’re either trying to rank on, or we have some specific reason why we don’t want those in our our main campaigns and really like, The more organized you are, the easier it is to make adjustments, right. Like, I don’t think there’s a golden campaign structure. But it’s a golden campaign structure, as long as you’re able to optimize properly, right, and really move the terms really the downside of like having too many terms in one campaign is, let’s say 90% of your spend goes against 10% of the keywords in that campaign. Right. And so now you’re missing out on all these other terms. That could be good. They could not be good. But because the campaign structure isn’t there, or you’re not diligent enough about making those optimizations, now you can end up sleeping on potential winners. Yeah.
Ben Donovan
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Then just rounding up and finishing off in terms of the future of PPC, where do you where do you see the things go in the next year? Or two? Is it gonna keep getting more expensive? How do you how do you see the last?
Daniel Tejada
Oh, I mean, look, Amazon’s ad business grew 37%, quarter over quarter last year for December, like from a year over year basis. So and that’s a slow down from 50% is where I had been at prior to that. So the inflation is slowing down. But we still haven’t plateaued, right? Amazon still has way cheaper acquisition costs than any other platform, you know, that exists, right? If you’re running Google AdWords, like you can’t get these type of conversion rates on non branded traffic. You know, it’s it’s expensive from a CPC perspective. But Amazon has the highest conversion rates that exists so there’s still going to be more dollars coming in. I’m starting to work more with like some enterprise level brands. And, you know, they haven’t even dip their toes into Amazon really yet, but they are coming in and I know the types of budgets that they’ll bring to the table. So there will be more ad inflation and that’s why it’s important just to really strengthen your yourself and give yourself the highest chance of success, right. You know, we launch against bigger brands all the time and we win against bigger brands all the time. But it’s because we’re a lot smarter with the dollars, right? Like, I’m like Amazon’s choice on and off for the term pre workout against a brand that has, because I know the CMO there 10 to 15 times the ad budget on a monthly basis that I have, right. But I’ve still been able to sneak in and take market share, because of things like optimizing our listings in a certain way, right? Because we’re so efficient with the ad spend our ad spend can go a little bit further than someone who has bigger dollars sometimes.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, definitely. It’s crazy how many big brands still have the simplest of listings with oh, it’s
Daniel Tejada
crazy. Some of those audits I go into, and I’m like, wow, this is this is how you get a couple million a month on Amazon. Yes. That’s impressive.
Ben Donovan
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Man. I feel like this has been just like an absolute. Just trainload of good information for people to go away with. If you got some like one final last action, like top tip for Amazon sellers going into the new world of selling on Amazon,
Daniel Tejada
I’d say, know your market right there. Like there’s plenty of tools out there. Tools like helium 10. There’s Jungle Scout, you know, if you’re looking to launch or you’re already a seller. With those tools, you can kind of get a sense of like, what’s the size of the prize that might really where I need to be. But you can also know how competitive something is, before you get into it. Right? I know plenty of sellers that they’ve got a great product, but at the end of the day, they just don’t know what they’re getting into. And that’s why they don’t succeed, right? Amazon at the end of the day, it’s just a visibility channel. So check your sessions, check your conversion rate, those two KPIs will give you so much information. Just off those two things alone. Amazon has a lot of noise. But those were really the only two things that matter at the end of the day.
Ben Donovan
Absolutely. Absolutely. Final one. Speaking of tools, do you guys lean on PPC tools, or you do a lot manual?
Daniel Tejada
Ah, so we use a combination. We’ve got API access with Amazon directly. So we have some tools we build out for reporting and market share tracking, we do use a technology partner. There’s quite a few out there, I recommend like a tool that is rule based ideally. So like we leverage in 10 wise has a fully automated version, I use them in a rule based model where we kind of create our own rules there, but it allows me to do automations and be extremely efficient with my ad dollars, but also have the flexibility to, you know, advertise in the way that I like to advertise. Yeah,
Ben Donovan
definitely, definitely. Good stuff. Man. This has been super valuable. And I really appreciate you taking time out. If people do want to find out more about the agency and what you’re up to, where’s the best place to find
Daniel Tejada
you? Yeah, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m staying up to date on LinkedIn or our website straightupgrowth.com.
Ben Donovan
Nice. We’ll leave the links for those in the description and show notes, obviously, as well. Thanks again. Really appreciate you coming on.
Daniel Tejada
Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate the time.
Ben Donovan
no worries. Well, thanks, guys for listening as well. Make sure to check out those resources in the show notes in the description below. And I will see you in the next episode, same time next week.