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If you’re selling on Amazon there’s every chance you’re using Amazon PPC to drive sales and increase organic visibility.
But, according to this week’s podcast guest, most sellers are missing out on big opportunities with Sponsored Brand advertising.
While Sponsored Products is the bread and butter of an Amazon PPC strategy, Sponsored Brands can add a significant amount of extra volume without being too complicated to set up.
In this episode, Ad Badger founder Michael Facchin talks us through best practices in getting Sponsored Brand advertising set up in order to quickly add 20-30% extra revenue to your business.
Episode Links
- Find out more about Ad Badger
Additional Resources
- Get our weekly Brand Builder Newsletter
Talking Points
00:00 Introduction To Guest: Michael Facchin
00:55 Ad Badger’s History and Background on Amazon
03:55 Story behind the name “Ad Badger”
06:06 Effective brand strategy with sponsored ads in 2023
10:18 How soon should a new seller start sponsored brands?
13:30 Case study: Recommended approach to improve ACOS
17:23 Integrating sponsored brand ads into a campaign structure in terms of promoting keywords
22:36 Landing page – store page vs product page
29:36 Custom images for Amazon spotlight ads
32:08 Where do you see Amazon PPC going?
34:56 What’s your #1 Amazon tip for sellers to take away?
37:45 Where can people find out more about you?
Ben Donovan 00:00
Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of The Brand Builder Show. And if you want to level up your sponsored brand advertising on Amazon, then this is the episode for you because that’s what we’re going to be talking about with today’s guest, Michael from add badger. Michael, welcome to the show today. Thanks for coming on.
Michael Facchin 00:16
What’s going on? Ben, good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ben Donovan 00:19
I’m honored to have you on I’ve been, as I mentioned, before we started recording I’ve been a longtime listener of the ad badger podcast, was it called the PPC den or something
Michael Facchin 00:27
PPC den? Yes, that’s right. Thanks so much. Thanks for being part of badger nation.
Ben Donovan 00:31
There’s I mean, I don’t know really many other PPC dedicated podcasts at all. So it’s a great resource for Amazon sellers that want to level up their PPC game. And so I’m excited to dive into some of these topics with you. Before we do that, give us a bit of a rundown on your history. What brought you to starting at Ad Badger and what you guys do and what you’re up to at the moment.
Michael Facchin 00:54
How far back should we go? Yeah,
Ben Donovan 00:57
Day 1. Both. As much as you feel as relevant.
Michael Facchin 01:00
Yeah, I think the some relevant things are, I started freelancing on line and I started on sites like Upwork. And at the time, it was Elance. And I just really liked digital marketing. I’d liked the fact that it was, you know, helping people so I would meet a client, like learn about them. And like, they were always doing something interesting, and always doing something cool. And then being able to scratch the part of my brain that, I’m a bit of a gamer, like I grew up playing StarCraft two. I don’t know if anyone’s ever played that out there. And like Starcraft one, and it’s just like a real time strategy game. It’s like chess, where it’s like you versus the competition? And like, how are you going to use your resources better than somebody else? How are you going to like, find the next, you know, door to walk through and all these different things, how you gonna respond to these conditions. And I sort of put PPC in the sort of world of like, Technical Marketing, that really scratches that itch for me. And PPC, specifically, I just happen to really enjoy. I also like SEO.
Michael Facchin 02:04
But in 2010, I started search scientists, which is like a Google Ads PPC agency. And we had clients who would ask us like to do Amazon stuff. And I feel really lucky that around the time that we got started primarily as Google ads, we had sort of this client early, you know, considered early in like today’s context, you know, where like, eight years ago, nine years ago, they wanted to put their products on Amazon, and begin to use Amazon advertising to drive more traffic. So I got this sort of early exposure to Amazon ads, and I was able to sort of carry that through. And part of the idea for ad badger was, number one simplicity, like to have a company for Google ads. Another one for Amazon ads, make life really simple. But the other thing too, was I was using a lot of like advanced tools for Google ads at the time. And then at the time, and like 2016 2017, I was like, man, where are all the tools for Amazon ads. And obviously 2023 it’s a different story. But at the time, I was just like, man, like, I would love to have a tool that did this and did that and did this. So I wanted to create, like, the practitioners tool for Amazon advertising. And that started Ad Badger, which is a software company. And I absolutely love thinking about software building software. It’s a incredibly uphill battle. It’s incredibly tricky and challenging, especially Amazon. You know, every time like, every once in a while, you’ll log on to Amazon’s dashboard, like advertising the amazon.com. And you’ll like look at your results. And they’ll be like a banner at the top of the screen. It’s like, data for this day is like, coming soon. And it’s like, okay, like that’s what it’s like, like working with the API sometimes. And that’s a little bit about me.
Ben Donovan 03:50
Yeah, that’s good, man. It’s good. I got to ask Ad Badger. Is there like a story behind the name?
Michael Facchin 03:55
Have you seen the viral video? This is like one of the early days, viral videos about the honey badger. Hold on. Let me let me shoot Hold on. I have a book over here. Is any of this ringing a bell to you, Honey Badger, Honey Badger don’t care? Nothing. You’ve never seen this.
Ben Donovan 04:16
To be honest. Maybe I’m showing my lack of relevance.
Michael Facchin 04:19
Well I need to give you some homework. This is like one of the early viral videos. It’s like over 10 years old. And it’s just a story about how it’s like a National Geographic documentary with his badger running around and he’s running into beehives. And he’s like, fighting snakes and like, biting a snake and the snake knocks him out. And then after a couple hours, a honey badger get back gets back up and just like scurries off. So it’s this sort of like indestructible, you know, badass animal. And yeah, someone just got me this book. And it’s supposed to be a children’s book, honey badger don’t care. So yeah, so that’s where and it also sounds good.
Ben Donovan 05:01
Yeah. It stands out to me. Yeah.
Michael Facchin 05:04
Ad Rabbit was actually my first choice because like small and nimble, but it was like taken. So screw it, got into the next idea.
Ben Donovan 05:10
Yeah. Good stuff. Good. All right, well, we’re gonna dive into sponsored brands specifically, obviously, there’s lots we could cover with PPC. And we’ve had a few guests on talking about just general campaign structure, bidding strategy, that kind of thing. But I thought it would be good to we haven’t really had an episode talking about sponsored brands, specifically, and in 2020, through 2023. You know, especially there is like a real need for brands to you know, really lean into this extra branded content that Amazon is providing. So it’s always good to to chat through and get your thoughts on it. Obviously, you would be working with a lot, but just from obviously, the sponsored brands perspective, it’s evolved a lot over recent years, I suppose. Top line thoughts – what does an effective strategy with sponsored brands look like right now 2023 and beyond, to kick us off, and then we’ll dive into some of the more detail of it.
Michael Facchin 06:07
Yeah, so the first thing I did, I did some data analysis. Before I got on the call today, I knew we’re gonna be talking about sponsored brands. And there’s about 1100 marketplaces, give or take on ad badger. And of that, I will give you the ACOS by campaign type. So we’ve gotten three sponsored product sponsored brands, sponsored display, sponsored products, it’s about 30%, average ACOS. Sponsored brand is also about 30%. It’s literally 30.09 for sponsored products. And then 30.55 for sponsor brand. Sponsored display is in its own category, average ACOS of click based, is 59%. Sponsored display is much higher.
Michael Facchin 06:54
So when we think of sponsored brands in context, I would say most advertisers should use it in a similar manner, and similar strategy, that they use sponsored products. And that’s actually not the intended purpose of sponsored brands, like sponsored brands, it’s for showing off the brand, it’s to get new to brand metrics, like all these different things. If you think about it, it’s great for it’s like, so perfect for somebody like Nike, who maybe someone doesn’t exactly know what kind of Nike shoe they want to buy, maybe they don’t even, they’re not 100% sold that they want Nike just yet, so they’re browsing, and you’re able to show a variety of products in one ad unit, you’re able to show your store spotlight in one ad unit. And you don’t need to be Nike in order to get value out of these. But that’s some of the spirit that it was sort of created for to sort of do the brand showcase.
Michael Facchin 07:52
Now with all that being said, whenever we moved to the top of funnel like that, and we do this sort of brand showcase, like look at all of the products we have, I want to talk about when to do that. And for companies who are not Nike, you know, maybe you have 10, ASINs, maybe you have 20 ASINs. I think the strategy changes a lot. So to sort of think how I think of the quickest, fastest way to get value out of sponsored brands, is to really tease out the brand components and try to do it like sponsored products. And what I mean by that is direct response, try to get clicks, try to get sales as quickly as possible. So like sort of shrink the shrink the steps to do that as quickly as possible. And you should ultimately end up with an ACOS that’s right around sponsored products. And I’ll finish that thought by saying, if I look at an account, somebody comes to me, they’re like, “Hey, I’m spending $10,000 a month”, and they open up their account. And it’s almost all sponsored products. The easiest thing that I say is, well, if you’re spending 10,000 a month on sponsored products, my bet would be that we could probably increase your budget, probably about 40% at a similar ACOS. So like we could probably take this to 14, $15,000 a month in ad spend with the exact same ACOS. Anthat is I think the biggest value piece of sponsored brands just like whatever you’re doing sponsored products, you can probably do anywhere from 40 to 50% of it in sponsor brands without even getting into the all of the extra nuance that sponsor brand brings in literally just take the same keywords and hammer it home on sponsored brands. So I think that I know I kept on saying that I’m going to be done in a second. But I think that right there is the essence of like getting started with sponsor brands, and how to really think about it in a clear, direct response Rojas driven way.
Ben Donovan 09:43
Yes, it’s really helpful and fascinating that the A cos is so similar across obviously a lot of accounts and so that shows that it’s not just you know, those are those are true and untested figures on there. So very, very interesting. You mentioned about you know, getting started straight away A putting money into sponsored brands. If it’s a new seller coming onto the platform, obviously, they’re going to need a certain amount of ASINs to make some of the ad formats work. How soon though, should a new seller start sponsored brands you think straightaway as soon as they’re launching a product?
Michael Facchin 10:18
No, I think if somebody you know, number one, you need multiple products in order to have the ad unit in the first place. You know, with, you know, sponsor brand video, you don’t, you can just pick that sort of that one product free for that. And that’s nice. But I think the, I think the thing to sort of think of is, you start with sponsored products, because it is the most conversion focused, ad type, which is great. So you want to start with that sort of conversion focus. Eventually, you can move on to more middle of funnel keywords and still remain in the world of sponsored products, which generally have a better conversion rate, where people go, so if you’re a beginning advertiser, it’s very, very easy to go off the rails when it comes to sponsored brands. What I mean by that there’s lots of options and lots of settings that you can get distracted by that, like pull people away from this direct response. What kind of video should I have? You know, maybe that opens up a whole can of worms, you get into, what should my store look like? That’s a whole can of worms, which can sort of pull people away from the absolute direct response.
Michael Facchin 11:37
So a very easy way to get pulled away is like thinking of that store spotlight. And thinking of that now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying don’t do the store spotlight, don’t do video, like the very best brands, the most successful customers we have, are all doing those things that are sort of thinking of like the ramp up the easy ramp up the easiest, fastest way to get started, scale your sponsored products, get it to a point where you feel like okay, this is good, this is a good sizable amount of spend, whatever it is for your company would have you defined sizable amount, it’s probably going to be around 10% of your total revenue, if you’re starting out, it’s probably might be close to 15% of your total revenue. Depending on what industry it is, might be higher or lower. But as soon as you get to that point, and you’re like, huh, I feel pretty good, like hitting the keywords that were obvious for sponsored products. That’s great. Now, all of a sudden, why don’t I take those same keywords that are doing well, and launch a launch into sponsored brands. In between that step you’re launching, you know, you’re going from one product to two products or three products, and then tapping into sponsored brands. So you can serve a product collection add. And in between, in between that step of actually launching those additional products. That is a nice strategy that sits on top of all good Amazon Marketing, which is just slowly introducing new products over time. That’s a sign of a high growth company on Amazon to just constantly adding something new, capturing more market share in their category capturing different ways that people are searching for thing capturing different demand in a related way. And that sort of fuels your brand, which sets you up so nicely for a product collection ad where you have multiple great products with multiple great star ratings. That’s a really appealing component to advertising.
Ben Donovan 13:24
So much on I ask so many so many questions that are run around my head. But what I think would be good is maybe taking one of my accounts at the moment is a bit of a case study, because I stripped everything back to try and really improve a cause the main product that we sell with this one is like $15, it’s hard to get those metrics to work. And so I’ve just been doing a lot of sponsored products lately to really get those drill down and not really any sponsored brand. So you talking about this is really light in my kind of brain centers up like Man, there’s big opportunities here. So we’re spending about five $600 a day. So whatever that is about 15,000 a month. So it sounds like I could easily go out there and spend another six 7000 on sponsored brands for a similar Akos. what should be my approach with that? Should it just be starting with a video see how that goes and then look at a headline out and see how that goes? Or do you have like a recommended approach? just blast it all out there?
Michael Facchin 14:24
Do you have enough products for the product collection? Yeah, perfect. So the first thing I would do is I would look at your sponsor products, I would look at the search terms where you convert very well and I would just plaster those into sponsored brands product collection. Don’t need to overthink it. So that’s that’s absolutely what I would do. And that would probably be you know if you throw your you know if you think of your keyword list as an 80:20 So let’s look at those top 20% of keywords giving you 80% of your sponsor brand sales. That is where I would sort of put my focus on sponsored brands product collection. I don’t know if you want to get into the store component of sponsored brands, but to keep things simple, that’s exactly what everything. So if you think of sponsored brands you have, well actually this is true for every ad type. Every ad type sponsored product sponsored brand sponsored display has parts of it, which are direct response, see. And when I say direct response, it’s like someone searches for the product, they want to buy it, they click on it, they buy it – direct response, versus brand based ads or sort of awareness type ads, or sort of further up the funnel type ads. So an example of that within sponsored products might be, you know, I’m selling a mason jar, you know, mason jar 16-ounce, I’m advertising sponsored products for that thing at that time. That’s exactly what they want. It’s high user intent. You know what they want to buy, you know, they want to buy something, because they’re on Amazon, and you know exactly what it is.
Michael Facchin 16:10
As you move up the funnel, and you get a little bit less specific, you know, now it’s just mason jar, well, it’s like, what kind of mason jar do they want to buy. And then you go up a little further, and you get into like, canning supplies or kitchen gear, you know, kitchen, kitchen supplies, and you go further up the funnel. And you’re still within the exact same keyword based, exact match sponsored product ad slot. So any ad type has this sort of bottom of funnel, top of funnel thing. So when we talk about sort of scaling back our advertising spin, which is a fantastic activity that, you know, maybe once a year, all advertisers should just sort of audit their own ad spent, it’s like, Hey, maybe I get rid of everything that I am not in love with, I’ll 80:20 my ad account in some way and just sort of reevaluate everything. And that opens up a can of worms of like how to do that without taking too much off the table. But to your point, when you talk about scaling back, you get rid of those sponsored brands that are more like brand focused, not as direct response, as a way to sort of 80:20 and focus more on direct response. So take those keywords, put it in a product collection? That’s exactly what I would do.
Ben Donovan 17:23
Do you typically integrate ad sponsored brand ads into like a campaign structure in terms of promoting keywords, etc?
Michael Facchin 17:32
Oh, like, you know, splitting up match types and all that good stuff. Yes. So you know, sponsored brands just came out with ad groups. As you know, at one point in time, they did not have ad groups, which was really annoying to like, build in, as you could imagine, it’s like, we’d come up with a rule for like campaigns, you click on a campaign, you view the ad groups in there, and sponsor brands didn’t have any. And then now they do. So we have to go like redo a whole bunch. Anyway, that’s a great. So in general, I want my settings to reflect what’s inside the campaign as specifically as possible. So the easiest way to think of that is like I have a campaign budget, that I sort of want to be as specific as possible. So I don’t want 50 products in a campaign because now the budget is sort of spread out between all of them. Unless all those products are nearly identical and behaving the same that was sponsored brands, you don’t get the luxury of saying I only want to spend this much on Product A this much on product B and this much on product C. So you sort of want to think about those as like one unit, like that’s as segmented as you can possibly get. So I would not advise to use sponsored brand ad groups, just like one ad, one group per campaign, think of it like that. So when you do that, you generally also want to split that with one targeting type per unit as well. So you have your budget, you have your product, a unit, and you have your target a unit. And you I really want these like to be specific. So I am not a fan of mixing match types, I would not have exact phrase broad modified broad all in one spot, I would absolutely split those out. And again, it allows you to say, again, we’re talking like direct response, high conversion intent, versus more research based more mid for top of funnel branding based, when you insert broad that’s going to behave differently than exact. So those opposite ends of the spectrum. Do you want to treat these differently? And you’re going to want to think in your own campaign structure. How much budget do I want to allocate towards broad how much budget do I want to allocate towards exact and that’s where the decision comes to sort of set these budgets. Now, you don’t need to, you know, do calculus in order to determine what your budget should be. But you know, you might look at your account, hopefully you’ve labeled your campaigns properly, and you have broad and all the broad campaigns and exactly all the exact campaigns. And you can just do a quick search of your campaigns to sort of get a sense of like, how much budget am I spending on exact? Okay, that’s only 20% of my budget. Wow, 60% of my budget is on broad. I’ve got to reel that back. So like having these things broken out, allow you to analyze things this way.
Ben Donovan 20:25
And do you treat them the same? If you find a search term that’s not converting a new word negative in your sponsored product campaigns? Do you do exactly the same as sponsored brand? Or do you find that they perform differently,
Michael Facchin 20:38
I’m generally not a fan of like something misbehaves and ad group A, also block it and ad group B, that are like different campaigns, I generally like things to live on their own. Because you know, there’s plenty of weird quirks where like, the plural version actually does convert well, and the singular version does not convert well. So that happens, I feel like that’s happened more and more since Amazon changed their broad match, targeting. So in general, I would say, don’t do that the thing where I do do that, we do this thing here at Badger called N gram analysis. So it’s like, if you have, you know, mason jars for cooking in one ad group, and it only has 10 clicks, you might not be able to make a decision on it. But then you have cooking, like cooking supply mason jar, and that has 10 clicks. And you can’t make a decision because it doesn’t have enough clicks, sometimes you can sort of sum the word cooking in both places, and sort of see how the word cooking performs in every single ad group. And every single time it’s in a search term. So that’s one of my favorite activities. And that is where I would do a search term analysis in one spot, because it’s sort of an aggregate of everywhere where the word cooking is. And then if it’s really bad, like if every single search term that the word cooking was a part of gets its sums up to like 50 clicks and orders, then I sort of know like cooking is a is a negative signal and I shouldn’t be appearing for anything but the word cooking in it. That’s where I might do a negative phrase to just sort of clear that out. But that’s the only time I would use data from one ad group and apply it to other ad groups, that sort of sum and I call it N gram analysis.
Ben Donovan 22:30
Yeah. Now, that’s an interesting strategy, actually. And I can see why that would be quite effective. You mentioned maybe not going too much into the weeds, but would be good to talk about, you know, your product collection as where you’re sending people. Obviously, if it’s variations of the same product to the product display page, I would imagine, but you know, your thoughts on going to the store page going to a landing page? What do you do on that front?
Michael Facchin 22:58
Yeah, so now, I think, you know, in the world of so it’s very easy here to get distracted, right. So the thing to get distracted on is getting away from direct response ads. So what I mean by that is, if I’m selling, let’s say a great example are like industrial supplies. I’m going to say like screws, there’s so many different types of screws with so many different kinds of heads of screws, materials of screws, length, width, weight of screws, it’s insane. So like with that, imagine somebody types in, you know, wood screw, Phillips head, something, something, something all about the screw. So they typed in like eight words to describe the kind of screw that they need. And then they also typed in how many of them they wanted. 20 Pack, like they were so ultra specific. So the picture like a 10 word, keyword. When you serve that sponsored brand ad, and if they click on that, if you send them to a store page with multiple products on it, you’re absolutely crazy. Because they typed in something hyper specific, this is deep in the funnel, this is high user intent, you know exactly what they want, you know exactly where to send that. You want to send that person to the product page for that product. I think we all understand that. So that’s like the direct response component. Where people get tripped up. It’s like, oh, maybe I sent them to a store page. Because, you know, they could see all my screws. That’s a do they want to see all our for screws, you would take them there. If they searched screw, now you have no idea what kind of screw they want. And you can sort of in your own industry, this is where you sort of have to think unfortunately, you have to think I just like simple like when this happens do this. But you actually actually have to like look at the search terms that you’re going for or, and then begin to say, Where’s the switch point at which I know exactly what they want. So I’m going to send them to the product page. Whereas the switch point to where I no longer know what they want, so I’m going to send them to a store page. And you know, you, there’s a spectrum, right, the 10-word, search term describing the specific screw all the way to, you know, even more broad than screw, it would be like, I don’t know, homebuilding supplies or something like something hyper general, you have no idea what they want. So there’s a spectrum, right. And then you can look inside that spectrum and determine what is the best store page to send people. So if they search, screw, you know where to send them, because you don’t know if they want a wood screw or a screw for metal or whatever. But if they search Woodscrews, you sort of can send them to your woodscrew page. And if they have search, you know, screws with anchors, you can take them to anchor page. So you can take them to all these different pages, based off how specific their search is. And it’s kind of what I what I’m describing is pretty annoying. It takes hard work and you have to sort of think about where the ROI is for this activity. Again, you get the most ROI for the high intent, high intent things at first. So like spend a lot of your time there. After you sort of nailed that down, then you could begin to say, Hmm, I think my campaigns I want to grow a little bit more, I think I can capture more market share. And I’m going to begin to go up the funnel, I’m going to get more broad with my keywords, I’m gonna get lower user intent, I’m gonna get more nonspecific with things. And that’s where a beautiful store page matters so much, that’s where a really great video matters so much, because now if they search screw, and they never heard of you, you can sort of let them know like, okay, like, I’m a builder, I’m building something, and like, this is the best screw ever. It’s never gonna split. And like I can find all the different kinds of screws that I’ll need and like they have exactly what I want. That’s where that story becomes hugely ROI valuable.
Ben Donovan 27:01
Yeah. It is a lot to think about and a lot to work on. But I think it’s really good, really helpful that way you separate those out. And I think, listeners at all stages of the journey can really grab something from that. And well, a lot of people that are starting out that are maybe spending 510 $15,000 a month, you know, first priority is just that high intent, their response, like you say, and really it because that was one of the questions that we didn’t really talk about, because you kind of already answered it. In terms of the overall strategy. I think a lot of people coming into sponsored brands think, well, this is about brand awareness, it doesn’t matter about the cost, because it’s just getting them used to my brand. But actually, there are, you know, levels of this, right? You know, there is like you say the direct response, which is all about a cost driving profitable sales. But and that’s what most people should start with, if I’m summarizing what you said correctly. And then there’s like another level, which when you really maxed out all of the opportunities with the direct response, and you can’t really grow too much more other than adding more products. It’s a case of now how can we got that funnel and do some branded stuff, bring more awareness with some more general stuff?
Michael Facchin 28:10
Absolutely. And the most successful people that I work with, have that sort of, you know, barbell strategy where like, they invest heavily on the bottom of funnel, high intent, direct response, get, let’s get the sales campaigns. And then they know the value of going after that sort of mid top funnel. Keywords is more broad, there’s more general things, there’s more brand awareness, those definitely matter. Like there’s a reason why, you know, Nike spends a bajillion dollars on all of that top of funnel branding, sponsoring athletes sponsoring events, doing all these things. It’s like the definition of like, super top of funnel, because ultimately, it’ll, you know, give people an idea of what Nike means, when they make that search. And there’s, you know, there’s that varying degrees of benefit for different companies. You know, depending on where you land with your product, who’s buying it, and how much thought goes into that purchase, those things do begin to matter more depending on your type of company. So there’s a lot of sort of cerebral conversations to have when it comes to you know, how much is it worth investing in the brand? I think in general, though, like the brands that do it, well are doing it well and like they’re bigger for a reason. So those things I think do matter.
Ben Donovan 29:34
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And then finally, just one last thing that may be a bit smaller, and less significant, but still custom images for the spotlights. Are you seeing anything in particular work really well there?
Michael Facchin 29:48
This is yeah, this is classic, you know, product imagery that works really well. Like people using the product. It’s like visualize themselves using it. I always like that Like, I won’t even I think that’s the number one like people using the product. It’s why on social media, like user generated content, where it’s like some influencer or somebody using the product, a video review of it, like, seeing the product actually in use is amazing. So if I’m selling a Frisbee, it’s like a picture of like the kids in the yard playing with a Frisbee. Yeah, for sure. That’s it? Yeah.
Ben Donovan 30:23
Good. no simple answer. Yeah, for sure.
Michael Facchin 30:27
And that’s, by the way, that’s where it’s so easy to get tripped up. Because you can literally go in any direction. When it comes to a video or a creative, you can go in any direction. So that’s where, you know, for me being so like, data driven, and like, I do just want like, the If This Then That, like, tell me when I’m doing a video, like what kinds of things should I do in it? Like, all that stuff, is what I look for, like, oh, it’s somebody using the product that’s makes a lot of sense. You know, I don’t want the product like floating in space. You know, that’s where people like, make videos, where it’s just a collection of their product images, like, on a slideshow, kind of, and I guess like it’s better than nothing. But like, in a perfect world, like you’re actually using it, like demonstrating it and people. Oh, yeah, that’s exactly. Um, so you know, you might not know this way over there, you know about the Slap Chop. People listening will know, slapping your troubles away at the slap shot. It’s just like an infomercial. That’s why infomercials are so powerful. It’s like somebody slapping, you know, crushing garlic really easily. It’s like, oh, wow, like, that’s exactly what I want. Or Flex tape, like the big tank where the water is gushing out of it. And you just smacks the tape on it. Gotta see the product in use.
Ben Donovan 31:46
I’ve seen us and now on memes. That one? Not so out of touch? I haven’t seen that one, you know? Yes, slapping it on and getting rid of all your problems with a bit of that.
Michael Facchin 31:55
It’s like, Have you tried the power of positive thinking? It’s like that you’re like,
Ben Donovan 32:00
Yeah, I’ve seen that. And so many, especially in the digital marketing space as well. It’s like, yeah, good. Okay. Just to finish off, where do you see Amazon PPC going next couple of years is obviously changed so much in recent years. But what do you see, obviously, the rise of AI and Amazon’s getting more and more mature as a platform? What can we expect over the next year or two?
Michael Facchin 32:25
Hmm. I think for me as a, so I think there’ll be a need for anyone doing specifically Amazon advertising. So I think Amazon advertising has been held up as like the, the primary thing to do to grow on Amazon. I think, where sometimes people will skip over some other issues in their company and only look at PPC as the solution. And I think that, you know, the most successful clients that I work with are not doing that they sort of view it in one compartment. And then they are able to view the overall scope of the business. And I think as a PPC marketer myself, I’ve really been stepping into more non PPC, areas of growth on Amazon, in order to do that. So I think it’s becoming a lot more integrated.
Michael Facchin 33:26
We talked about brands on this call, I think like those brand signals that you send to Amazon are becoming more and more impactful. So like sending Google ads, traffic to your listing, sending social traffic to your listing, building up an email list outside of Amazon and directing some of that email list to Amazon, like investing in brand assets, like all of these things, like getting good at SEO, all of these things are becoming crazy about your product quality. Doing user surveys and really understanding how people like your stuff, I think all of these things, when we think of the most successful ecommerce brands, I think those things should be creeping into, you know, if you think of E-commerce marketing as sort of like the DTC group, which does all those things, you know, oftentimes I’ll start on a Shopify store and then make a decision after millions of dollars of sales, maybe we should go on Amazon versus sort of the Amazon FBA or who starts on Amazon. And then, you know, sort of grows from there. And I think both groups can learn from each other. But I think one thing over the next few years is sort of taking that bigger business that bigger, broader view. With all the thinking about SEO thinking about brand assets, those things will I think become more and more valuable. And uh, yeah, of course AI to do all those things.
Ben Donovan 34:53
Definitely, that’s a whole nother conversation for another day. The I know I said Finally before, but I did want to ask you what’s your just overriding number one, Amazon PPC tip for sellers to take away?
Michael Facchin 35:07
I think my favorite one is. And this one, you know, maybe says a lot about my personality, but I really do think just literally being organized. And paying attention is the number one success factor that I see. A lot of people are very knee jerk reaction to their campaigns. So a lot of people will just look at their campaigns think something, oh, this is good, this is bad and then go and take a loss of action. Without like a broader like, this is what I want to accomplish this quarter. This is what I want to accomplish this month. You know, I see a lot of like sledgehammers are wrecking balls to people’s campaigns like, as opposed to just like meticulous, thoughtful, steady work more frequently. I’ve always felt does better than just like not paying attention to do it for two weeks. And then like coming in just like obliterating something. And like building an entirely new campaign structure. Really Herky jerky, I think that’s probably one of the worst things that I see. So on the flip side of that, the best thing to do is to really be meticulous, we use clique up. And I just love sort of like, what is it? What do we do on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis? Just ask just fill in all those like routine tasks, and then schedule some time for like free thought and like just browse around and like do stuff like that. I think all I think that is the reason I’ve been successful. I just write stuff down.
Ben Donovan 36:34
Yeah, that’s really good. And I think such a so important and underestimated truth. Because as soon as you start dealing with high volume campaigns and lots of keywords, each can get such a mess if you’re not organized, and have a structure of how he operates. I think yeah, that’s absolutely key. Thank you.
Michael Facchin 36:53
There’s so many issues, like there’s so many things like that in life. I was with someone one time. And it was at the end of the day, it was like 9pm. And he took out his laptop and he started writing emails. I’m like, What are you doing reading emails, like, we stopped working hours ago. It was like, oh, at the end of the day, I always write thank you notes to everyone I talked to today. He’s like, I’m not that smart. He’s like, something along the lines of like, I’m not that smart. But this is so easy to get people to like, you’re just like, that’s insane. And like, it’s such like an easy thing to do is like, oh, yeah, just like, thank people for taking the time to talk to you. And it’s like, everyone loves this guy.
Ben Donovan 37:30
Yeah, yeah, that’s class, stuff like that. Amazing. Good stuff. Okay. Well, honestly, this has been super insightful. And I know our listeners are gonna get so much out of it. It’s clear that you do spend a lot of time dug into this in the trenches. Where can people find out more about you about Ad Badger?
Michael Facchin 37:47
Yeah, you know, we’ve got over 250 episodes all about Amazon advertising, so people can search PPC Den like the Badger den PPC den, on their podcast platform of choice and find us or then go to adbadger.com to learn a little bit more about what we do professionally.
Ben Donovan 38:03
We’ll make sure we get those linked up in the show notes and description as well. Michael, thank you for taking the time out. This has been a super valuable episode.
Michael Facchin 38:12
Awesome. Ben. Have a good one!
Ben Donovan 38:13
Awesome. Thanks, guys for listening to this episode. I hope you got as much out of that as me. I got lots to work on. I’m sure you do too. But did you want to ask for the next episode? Same time next week. Take care guys. Bye bye
Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of The Brand Builder Show. And if you want to level up your sponsored brand advertising on Amazon, then this is the episode for you because that’s what we’re going to be talking about with today’s guest, Michael from add badger. Michael, welcome to the show today. Thanks for coming on.
Michael Facchin 00:16
What’s going on? Ben, good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ben Donovan 00:19
I’m honored to have you on I’ve been, as I mentioned, before we started recording I’ve been a longtime listener of the ad badger podcast, was it called the PPC den or something
Michael Facchin 00:27
PPC den? Yes, that’s right. Thanks so much. Thanks for being part of badger nation.
Ben Donovan 00:31
There’s I mean, I don’t know really many other PPC dedicated podcasts at all. So it’s a great resource for Amazon sellers that want to level up their PPC game. And so I’m excited to dive into some of these topics with you. Before we do that, give us a bit of a rundown on your history. What brought you to starting at Ad Badger and what you guys do and what you’re up to at the moment.
Michael Facchin 00:54
How far back should we go? Yeah,
Ben Donovan 00:57
Day 1. Both. As much as you feel as relevant.
Michael Facchin 01:00
Yeah, I think the some relevant things are, I started freelancing on line and I started on sites like Upwork. And at the time, it was Elance. And I just really liked digital marketing. I’d liked the fact that it was, you know, helping people so I would meet a client, like learn about them. And like, they were always doing something interesting, and always doing something cool. And then being able to scratch the part of my brain that, I’m a bit of a gamer, like I grew up playing StarCraft two. I don’t know if anyone’s ever played that out there. And like Starcraft one, and it’s just like a real time strategy game. It’s like chess, where it’s like you versus the competition? And like, how are you going to use your resources better than somebody else? How are you going to like, find the next, you know, door to walk through and all these different things, how you gonna respond to these conditions. And I sort of put PPC in the sort of world of like, Technical Marketing, that really scratches that itch for me. And PPC, specifically, I just happen to really enjoy. I also like SEO.
Michael Facchin 02:04
But in 2010, I started search scientists, which is like a Google Ads PPC agency. And we had clients who would ask us like to do Amazon stuff. And I feel really lucky that around the time that we got started primarily as Google ads, we had sort of this client early, you know, considered early in like today’s context, you know, where like, eight years ago, nine years ago, they wanted to put their products on Amazon, and begin to use Amazon advertising to drive more traffic. So I got this sort of early exposure to Amazon ads, and I was able to sort of carry that through. And part of the idea for ad badger was, number one simplicity, like to have a company for Google ads. Another one for Amazon ads, make life really simple. But the other thing too, was I was using a lot of like advanced tools for Google ads at the time. And then at the time, and like 2016 2017, I was like, man, where are all the tools for Amazon ads. And obviously 2023 it’s a different story. But at the time, I was just like, man, like, I would love to have a tool that did this and did that and did this. So I wanted to create, like, the practitioners tool for Amazon advertising. And that started Ad Badger, which is a software company. And I absolutely love thinking about software building software. It’s a incredibly uphill battle. It’s incredibly tricky and challenging, especially Amazon. You know, every time like, every once in a while, you’ll log on to Amazon’s dashboard, like advertising the amazon.com. And you’ll like look at your results. And they’ll be like a banner at the top of the screen. It’s like, data for this day is like, coming soon. And it’s like, okay, like that’s what it’s like, like working with the API sometimes. And that’s a little bit about me.
Ben Donovan 03:50
Yeah, that’s good, man. It’s good. I got to ask Ad Badger. Is there like a story behind the name?
Michael Facchin 03:55
Have you seen the viral video? This is like one of the early days, viral videos about the honey badger. Hold on. Let me let me shoot Hold on. I have a book over here. Is any of this ringing a bell to you, Honey Badger, Honey Badger don’t care? Nothing. You’ve never seen this.
Ben Donovan 04:16
To be honest. Maybe I’m showing my lack of relevance.
Michael Facchin 04:19
Well I need to give you some homework. This is like one of the early viral videos. It’s like over 10 years old. And it’s just a story about how it’s like a National Geographic documentary with his badger running around and he’s running into beehives. And he’s like, fighting snakes and like, biting a snake and the snake knocks him out. And then after a couple hours, a honey badger get back gets back up and just like scurries off. So it’s this sort of like indestructible, you know, badass animal. And yeah, someone just got me this book. And it’s supposed to be a children’s book, honey badger don’t care. So yeah, so that’s where and it also sounds good.
Ben Donovan 05:01
Yeah. It stands out to me. Yeah.
Michael Facchin 05:04
Ad Rabbit was actually my first choice because like small and nimble, but it was like taken. So screw it, got into the next idea.
Ben Donovan 05:10
Yeah. Good stuff. Good. All right, well, we’re gonna dive into sponsored brands specifically, obviously, there’s lots we could cover with PPC. And we’ve had a few guests on talking about just general campaign structure, bidding strategy, that kind of thing. But I thought it would be good to we haven’t really had an episode talking about sponsored brands, specifically, and in 2020, through 2023. You know, especially there is like a real need for brands to you know, really lean into this extra branded content that Amazon is providing. So it’s always good to to chat through and get your thoughts on it. Obviously, you would be working with a lot, but just from obviously, the sponsored brands perspective, it’s evolved a lot over recent years, I suppose. Top line thoughts – what does an effective strategy with sponsored brands look like right now 2023 and beyond, to kick us off, and then we’ll dive into some of the more detail of it.
Michael Facchin 06:07
Yeah, so the first thing I did, I did some data analysis. Before I got on the call today, I knew we’re gonna be talking about sponsored brands. And there’s about 1100 marketplaces, give or take on ad badger. And of that, I will give you the ACOS by campaign type. So we’ve gotten three sponsored product sponsored brands, sponsored display, sponsored products, it’s about 30%, average ACOS. Sponsored brand is also about 30%. It’s literally 30.09 for sponsored products. And then 30.55 for sponsor brand. Sponsored display is in its own category, average ACOS of click based, is 59%. Sponsored display is much higher.
Michael Facchin 06:54
So when we think of sponsored brands in context, I would say most advertisers should use it in a similar manner, and similar strategy, that they use sponsored products. And that’s actually not the intended purpose of sponsored brands, like sponsored brands, it’s for showing off the brand, it’s to get new to brand metrics, like all these different things. If you think about it, it’s great for it’s like, so perfect for somebody like Nike, who maybe someone doesn’t exactly know what kind of Nike shoe they want to buy, maybe they don’t even, they’re not 100% sold that they want Nike just yet, so they’re browsing, and you’re able to show a variety of products in one ad unit, you’re able to show your store spotlight in one ad unit. And you don’t need to be Nike in order to get value out of these. But that’s some of the spirit that it was sort of created for to sort of do the brand showcase.
Michael Facchin 07:52
Now with all that being said, whenever we moved to the top of funnel like that, and we do this sort of brand showcase, like look at all of the products we have, I want to talk about when to do that. And for companies who are not Nike, you know, maybe you have 10, ASINs, maybe you have 20 ASINs. I think the strategy changes a lot. So to sort of think how I think of the quickest, fastest way to get value out of sponsored brands, is to really tease out the brand components and try to do it like sponsored products. And what I mean by that is direct response, try to get clicks, try to get sales as quickly as possible. So like sort of shrink the shrink the steps to do that as quickly as possible. And you should ultimately end up with an ACOS that’s right around sponsored products. And I’ll finish that thought by saying, if I look at an account, somebody comes to me, they’re like, “Hey, I’m spending $10,000 a month”, and they open up their account. And it’s almost all sponsored products. The easiest thing that I say is, well, if you’re spending 10,000 a month on sponsored products, my bet would be that we could probably increase your budget, probably about 40% at a similar ACOS. So like we could probably take this to 14, $15,000 a month in ad spend with the exact same ACOS. Anthat is I think the biggest value piece of sponsored brands just like whatever you’re doing sponsored products, you can probably do anywhere from 40 to 50% of it in sponsor brands without even getting into the all of the extra nuance that sponsor brand brings in literally just take the same keywords and hammer it home on sponsored brands. So I think that I know I kept on saying that I’m going to be done in a second. But I think that right there is the essence of like getting started with sponsor brands, and how to really think about it in a clear, direct response Rojas driven way.
Ben Donovan 09:43
Yes, it’s really helpful and fascinating that the A cos is so similar across obviously a lot of accounts and so that shows that it’s not just you know, those are those are true and untested figures on there. So very, very interesting. You mentioned about you know, getting started straight away A putting money into sponsored brands. If it’s a new seller coming onto the platform, obviously, they’re going to need a certain amount of ASINs to make some of the ad formats work. How soon though, should a new seller start sponsored brands you think straightaway as soon as they’re launching a product?
Michael Facchin 10:18
No, I think if somebody you know, number one, you need multiple products in order to have the ad unit in the first place. You know, with, you know, sponsor brand video, you don’t, you can just pick that sort of that one product free for that. And that’s nice. But I think the, I think the thing to sort of think of is, you start with sponsored products, because it is the most conversion focused, ad type, which is great. So you want to start with that sort of conversion focus. Eventually, you can move on to more middle of funnel keywords and still remain in the world of sponsored products, which generally have a better conversion rate, where people go, so if you’re a beginning advertiser, it’s very, very easy to go off the rails when it comes to sponsored brands. What I mean by that there’s lots of options and lots of settings that you can get distracted by that, like pull people away from this direct response. What kind of video should I have? You know, maybe that opens up a whole can of worms, you get into, what should my store look like? That’s a whole can of worms, which can sort of pull people away from the absolute direct response.
Michael Facchin 11:37
So a very easy way to get pulled away is like thinking of that store spotlight. And thinking of that now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying don’t do the store spotlight, don’t do video, like the very best brands, the most successful customers we have, are all doing those things that are sort of thinking of like the ramp up the easy ramp up the easiest, fastest way to get started, scale your sponsored products, get it to a point where you feel like okay, this is good, this is a good sizable amount of spend, whatever it is for your company would have you defined sizable amount, it’s probably going to be around 10% of your total revenue, if you’re starting out, it’s probably might be close to 15% of your total revenue. Depending on what industry it is, might be higher or lower. But as soon as you get to that point, and you’re like, huh, I feel pretty good, like hitting the keywords that were obvious for sponsored products. That’s great. Now, all of a sudden, why don’t I take those same keywords that are doing well, and launch a launch into sponsored brands. In between that step you’re launching, you know, you’re going from one product to two products or three products, and then tapping into sponsored brands. So you can serve a product collection add. And in between, in between that step of actually launching those additional products. That is a nice strategy that sits on top of all good Amazon Marketing, which is just slowly introducing new products over time. That’s a sign of a high growth company on Amazon to just constantly adding something new, capturing more market share in their category capturing different ways that people are searching for thing capturing different demand in a related way. And that sort of fuels your brand, which sets you up so nicely for a product collection ad where you have multiple great products with multiple great star ratings. That’s a really appealing component to advertising.
Ben Donovan 13:24
So much on I ask so many so many questions that are run around my head. But what I think would be good is maybe taking one of my accounts at the moment is a bit of a case study, because I stripped everything back to try and really improve a cause the main product that we sell with this one is like $15, it’s hard to get those metrics to work. And so I’ve just been doing a lot of sponsored products lately to really get those drill down and not really any sponsored brand. So you talking about this is really light in my kind of brain centers up like Man, there’s big opportunities here. So we’re spending about five $600 a day. So whatever that is about 15,000 a month. So it sounds like I could easily go out there and spend another six 7000 on sponsored brands for a similar Akos. what should be my approach with that? Should it just be starting with a video see how that goes and then look at a headline out and see how that goes? Or do you have like a recommended approach? just blast it all out there?
Michael Facchin 14:24
Do you have enough products for the product collection? Yeah, perfect. So the first thing I would do is I would look at your sponsor products, I would look at the search terms where you convert very well and I would just plaster those into sponsored brands product collection. Don’t need to overthink it. So that’s that’s absolutely what I would do. And that would probably be you know if you throw your you know if you think of your keyword list as an 80:20 So let’s look at those top 20% of keywords giving you 80% of your sponsor brand sales. That is where I would sort of put my focus on sponsored brands product collection. I don’t know if you want to get into the store component of sponsored brands, but to keep things simple, that’s exactly what everything. So if you think of sponsored brands you have, well actually this is true for every ad type. Every ad type sponsored product sponsored brand sponsored display has parts of it, which are direct response, see. And when I say direct response, it’s like someone searches for the product, they want to buy it, they click on it, they buy it – direct response, versus brand based ads or sort of awareness type ads, or sort of further up the funnel type ads. So an example of that within sponsored products might be, you know, I’m selling a mason jar, you know, mason jar 16-ounce, I’m advertising sponsored products for that thing at that time. That’s exactly what they want. It’s high user intent. You know what they want to buy, you know, they want to buy something, because they’re on Amazon, and you know exactly what it is.
Michael Facchin 16:10
As you move up the funnel, and you get a little bit less specific, you know, now it’s just mason jar, well, it’s like, what kind of mason jar do they want to buy. And then you go up a little further, and you get into like, canning supplies or kitchen gear, you know, kitchen, kitchen supplies, and you go further up the funnel. And you’re still within the exact same keyword based, exact match sponsored product ad slot. So any ad type has this sort of bottom of funnel, top of funnel thing. So when we talk about sort of scaling back our advertising spin, which is a fantastic activity that, you know, maybe once a year, all advertisers should just sort of audit their own ad spent, it’s like, Hey, maybe I get rid of everything that I am not in love with, I’ll 80:20 my ad account in some way and just sort of reevaluate everything. And that opens up a can of worms of like how to do that without taking too much off the table. But to your point, when you talk about scaling back, you get rid of those sponsored brands that are more like brand focused, not as direct response, as a way to sort of 80:20 and focus more on direct response. So take those keywords, put it in a product collection? That’s exactly what I would do.
Ben Donovan 17:23
Do you typically integrate ad sponsored brand ads into like a campaign structure in terms of promoting keywords, etc?
Michael Facchin 17:32
Oh, like, you know, splitting up match types and all that good stuff. Yes. So you know, sponsored brands just came out with ad groups. As you know, at one point in time, they did not have ad groups, which was really annoying to like, build in, as you could imagine, it’s like, we’d come up with a rule for like campaigns, you click on a campaign, you view the ad groups in there, and sponsor brands didn’t have any. And then now they do. So we have to go like redo a whole bunch. Anyway, that’s a great. So in general, I want my settings to reflect what’s inside the campaign as specifically as possible. So the easiest way to think of that is like I have a campaign budget, that I sort of want to be as specific as possible. So I don’t want 50 products in a campaign because now the budget is sort of spread out between all of them. Unless all those products are nearly identical and behaving the same that was sponsored brands, you don’t get the luxury of saying I only want to spend this much on Product A this much on product B and this much on product C. So you sort of want to think about those as like one unit, like that’s as segmented as you can possibly get. So I would not advise to use sponsored brand ad groups, just like one ad, one group per campaign, think of it like that. So when you do that, you generally also want to split that with one targeting type per unit as well. So you have your budget, you have your product, a unit, and you have your target a unit. And you I really want these like to be specific. So I am not a fan of mixing match types, I would not have exact phrase broad modified broad all in one spot, I would absolutely split those out. And again, it allows you to say, again, we’re talking like direct response, high conversion intent, versus more research based more mid for top of funnel branding based, when you insert broad that’s going to behave differently than exact. So those opposite ends of the spectrum. Do you want to treat these differently? And you’re going to want to think in your own campaign structure. How much budget do I want to allocate towards broad how much budget do I want to allocate towards exact and that’s where the decision comes to sort of set these budgets. Now, you don’t need to, you know, do calculus in order to determine what your budget should be. But you know, you might look at your account, hopefully you’ve labeled your campaigns properly, and you have broad and all the broad campaigns and exactly all the exact campaigns. And you can just do a quick search of your campaigns to sort of get a sense of like, how much budget am I spending on exact? Okay, that’s only 20% of my budget. Wow, 60% of my budget is on broad. I’ve got to reel that back. So like having these things broken out, allow you to analyze things this way.
Ben Donovan 20:25
And do you treat them the same? If you find a search term that’s not converting a new word negative in your sponsored product campaigns? Do you do exactly the same as sponsored brand? Or do you find that they perform differently,
Michael Facchin 20:38
I’m generally not a fan of like something misbehaves and ad group A, also block it and ad group B, that are like different campaigns, I generally like things to live on their own. Because you know, there’s plenty of weird quirks where like, the plural version actually does convert well, and the singular version does not convert well. So that happens, I feel like that’s happened more and more since Amazon changed their broad match, targeting. So in general, I would say, don’t do that the thing where I do do that, we do this thing here at Badger called N gram analysis. So it’s like, if you have, you know, mason jars for cooking in one ad group, and it only has 10 clicks, you might not be able to make a decision on it. But then you have cooking, like cooking supply mason jar, and that has 10 clicks. And you can’t make a decision because it doesn’t have enough clicks, sometimes you can sort of sum the word cooking in both places, and sort of see how the word cooking performs in every single ad group. And every single time it’s in a search term. So that’s one of my favorite activities. And that is where I would do a search term analysis in one spot, because it’s sort of an aggregate of everywhere where the word cooking is. And then if it’s really bad, like if every single search term that the word cooking was a part of gets its sums up to like 50 clicks and orders, then I sort of know like cooking is a is a negative signal and I shouldn’t be appearing for anything but the word cooking in it. That’s where I might do a negative phrase to just sort of clear that out. But that’s the only time I would use data from one ad group and apply it to other ad groups, that sort of sum and I call it N gram analysis.
Ben Donovan 22:30
Yeah. Now, that’s an interesting strategy, actually. And I can see why that would be quite effective. You mentioned maybe not going too much into the weeds, but would be good to talk about, you know, your product collection as where you’re sending people. Obviously, if it’s variations of the same product to the product display page, I would imagine, but you know, your thoughts on going to the store page going to a landing page? What do you do on that front?
Michael Facchin 22:58
Yeah, so now, I think, you know, in the world of so it’s very easy here to get distracted, right. So the thing to get distracted on is getting away from direct response ads. So what I mean by that is, if I’m selling, let’s say a great example are like industrial supplies. I’m going to say like screws, there’s so many different types of screws with so many different kinds of heads of screws, materials of screws, length, width, weight of screws, it’s insane. So like with that, imagine somebody types in, you know, wood screw, Phillips head, something, something, something all about the screw. So they typed in like eight words to describe the kind of screw that they need. And then they also typed in how many of them they wanted. 20 Pack, like they were so ultra specific. So the picture like a 10 word, keyword. When you serve that sponsored brand ad, and if they click on that, if you send them to a store page with multiple products on it, you’re absolutely crazy. Because they typed in something hyper specific, this is deep in the funnel, this is high user intent, you know exactly what they want, you know exactly where to send that. You want to send that person to the product page for that product. I think we all understand that. So that’s like the direct response component. Where people get tripped up. It’s like, oh, maybe I sent them to a store page. Because, you know, they could see all my screws. That’s a do they want to see all our for screws, you would take them there. If they searched screw, now you have no idea what kind of screw they want. And you can sort of in your own industry, this is where you sort of have to think unfortunately, you have to think I just like simple like when this happens do this. But you actually actually have to like look at the search terms that you’re going for or, and then begin to say, Where’s the switch point at which I know exactly what they want. So I’m going to send them to the product page. Whereas the switch point to where I no longer know what they want, so I’m going to send them to a store page. And you know, you, there’s a spectrum, right, the 10-word, search term describing the specific screw all the way to, you know, even more broad than screw, it would be like, I don’t know, homebuilding supplies or something like something hyper general, you have no idea what they want. So there’s a spectrum, right. And then you can look inside that spectrum and determine what is the best store page to send people. So if they search, screw, you know where to send them, because you don’t know if they want a wood screw or a screw for metal or whatever. But if they search Woodscrews, you sort of can send them to your woodscrew page. And if they have search, you know, screws with anchors, you can take them to anchor page. So you can take them to all these different pages, based off how specific their search is. And it’s kind of what I what I’m describing is pretty annoying. It takes hard work and you have to sort of think about where the ROI is for this activity. Again, you get the most ROI for the high intent, high intent things at first. So like spend a lot of your time there. After you sort of nailed that down, then you could begin to say, Hmm, I think my campaigns I want to grow a little bit more, I think I can capture more market share. And I’m going to begin to go up the funnel, I’m going to get more broad with my keywords, I’m gonna get lower user intent, I’m gonna get more nonspecific with things. And that’s where a beautiful store page matters so much, that’s where a really great video matters so much, because now if they search screw, and they never heard of you, you can sort of let them know like, okay, like, I’m a builder, I’m building something, and like, this is the best screw ever. It’s never gonna split. And like I can find all the different kinds of screws that I’ll need and like they have exactly what I want. That’s where that story becomes hugely ROI valuable.
Ben Donovan 27:01
Yeah. It is a lot to think about and a lot to work on. But I think it’s really good, really helpful that way you separate those out. And I think, listeners at all stages of the journey can really grab something from that. And well, a lot of people that are starting out that are maybe spending 510 $15,000 a month, you know, first priority is just that high intent, their response, like you say, and really it because that was one of the questions that we didn’t really talk about, because you kind of already answered it. In terms of the overall strategy. I think a lot of people coming into sponsored brands think, well, this is about brand awareness, it doesn’t matter about the cost, because it’s just getting them used to my brand. But actually, there are, you know, levels of this, right? You know, there is like you say the direct response, which is all about a cost driving profitable sales. But and that’s what most people should start with, if I’m summarizing what you said correctly. And then there’s like another level, which when you really maxed out all of the opportunities with the direct response, and you can’t really grow too much more other than adding more products. It’s a case of now how can we got that funnel and do some branded stuff, bring more awareness with some more general stuff?
Michael Facchin 28:10
Absolutely. And the most successful people that I work with, have that sort of, you know, barbell strategy where like, they invest heavily on the bottom of funnel, high intent, direct response, get, let’s get the sales campaigns. And then they know the value of going after that sort of mid top funnel. Keywords is more broad, there’s more general things, there’s more brand awareness, those definitely matter. Like there’s a reason why, you know, Nike spends a bajillion dollars on all of that top of funnel branding, sponsoring athletes sponsoring events, doing all these things. It’s like the definition of like, super top of funnel, because ultimately, it’ll, you know, give people an idea of what Nike means, when they make that search. And there’s, you know, there’s that varying degrees of benefit for different companies. You know, depending on where you land with your product, who’s buying it, and how much thought goes into that purchase, those things do begin to matter more depending on your type of company. So there’s a lot of sort of cerebral conversations to have when it comes to you know, how much is it worth investing in the brand? I think in general, though, like the brands that do it, well are doing it well and like they’re bigger for a reason. So those things I think do matter.
Ben Donovan 29:34
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And then finally, just one last thing that may be a bit smaller, and less significant, but still custom images for the spotlights. Are you seeing anything in particular work really well there?
Michael Facchin 29:48
This is yeah, this is classic, you know, product imagery that works really well. Like people using the product. It’s like visualize themselves using it. I always like that Like, I won’t even I think that’s the number one like people using the product. It’s why on social media, like user generated content, where it’s like some influencer or somebody using the product, a video review of it, like, seeing the product actually in use is amazing. So if I’m selling a Frisbee, it’s like a picture of like the kids in the yard playing with a Frisbee. Yeah, for sure. That’s it? Yeah.
Ben Donovan 30:23
Good. no simple answer. Yeah, for sure.
Michael Facchin 30:27
And that’s, by the way, that’s where it’s so easy to get tripped up. Because you can literally go in any direction. When it comes to a video or a creative, you can go in any direction. So that’s where, you know, for me being so like, data driven, and like, I do just want like, the If This Then That, like, tell me when I’m doing a video, like what kinds of things should I do in it? Like, all that stuff, is what I look for, like, oh, it’s somebody using the product that’s makes a lot of sense. You know, I don’t want the product like floating in space. You know, that’s where people like, make videos, where it’s just a collection of their product images, like, on a slideshow, kind of, and I guess like it’s better than nothing. But like, in a perfect world, like you’re actually using it, like demonstrating it and people. Oh, yeah, that’s exactly. Um, so you know, you might not know this way over there, you know about the Slap Chop. People listening will know, slapping your troubles away at the slap shot. It’s just like an infomercial. That’s why infomercials are so powerful. It’s like somebody slapping, you know, crushing garlic really easily. It’s like, oh, wow, like, that’s exactly what I want. Or Flex tape, like the big tank where the water is gushing out of it. And you just smacks the tape on it. Gotta see the product in use.
Ben Donovan 31:46
I’ve seen us and now on memes. That one? Not so out of touch? I haven’t seen that one, you know? Yes, slapping it on and getting rid of all your problems with a bit of that.
Michael Facchin 31:55
It’s like, Have you tried the power of positive thinking? It’s like that you’re like,
Ben Donovan 32:00
Yeah, I’ve seen that. And so many, especially in the digital marketing space as well. It’s like, yeah, good. Okay. Just to finish off, where do you see Amazon PPC going next couple of years is obviously changed so much in recent years. But what do you see, obviously, the rise of AI and Amazon’s getting more and more mature as a platform? What can we expect over the next year or two?
Michael Facchin 32:25
Hmm. I think for me as a, so I think there’ll be a need for anyone doing specifically Amazon advertising. So I think Amazon advertising has been held up as like the, the primary thing to do to grow on Amazon. I think, where sometimes people will skip over some other issues in their company and only look at PPC as the solution. And I think that, you know, the most successful clients that I work with are not doing that they sort of view it in one compartment. And then they are able to view the overall scope of the business. And I think as a PPC marketer myself, I’ve really been stepping into more non PPC, areas of growth on Amazon, in order to do that. So I think it’s becoming a lot more integrated.
Michael Facchin 33:26
We talked about brands on this call, I think like those brand signals that you send to Amazon are becoming more and more impactful. So like sending Google ads, traffic to your listing, sending social traffic to your listing, building up an email list outside of Amazon and directing some of that email list to Amazon, like investing in brand assets, like all of these things, like getting good at SEO, all of these things are becoming crazy about your product quality. Doing user surveys and really understanding how people like your stuff, I think all of these things, when we think of the most successful ecommerce brands, I think those things should be creeping into, you know, if you think of E-commerce marketing as sort of like the DTC group, which does all those things, you know, oftentimes I’ll start on a Shopify store and then make a decision after millions of dollars of sales, maybe we should go on Amazon versus sort of the Amazon FBA or who starts on Amazon. And then, you know, sort of grows from there. And I think both groups can learn from each other. But I think one thing over the next few years is sort of taking that bigger business that bigger, broader view. With all the thinking about SEO thinking about brand assets, those things will I think become more and more valuable. And uh, yeah, of course AI to do all those things.
Ben Donovan 34:53
Definitely, that’s a whole nother conversation for another day. The I know I said Finally before, but I did want to ask you what’s your just overriding number one, Amazon PPC tip for sellers to take away?
Michael Facchin 35:07
I think my favorite one is. And this one, you know, maybe says a lot about my personality, but I really do think just literally being organized. And paying attention is the number one success factor that I see. A lot of people are very knee jerk reaction to their campaigns. So a lot of people will just look at their campaigns think something, oh, this is good, this is bad and then go and take a loss of action. Without like a broader like, this is what I want to accomplish this quarter. This is what I want to accomplish this month. You know, I see a lot of like sledgehammers are wrecking balls to people’s campaigns like, as opposed to just like meticulous, thoughtful, steady work more frequently. I’ve always felt does better than just like not paying attention to do it for two weeks. And then like coming in just like obliterating something. And like building an entirely new campaign structure. Really Herky jerky, I think that’s probably one of the worst things that I see. So on the flip side of that, the best thing to do is to really be meticulous, we use clique up. And I just love sort of like, what is it? What do we do on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis? Just ask just fill in all those like routine tasks, and then schedule some time for like free thought and like just browse around and like do stuff like that. I think all I think that is the reason I’ve been successful. I just write stuff down.
Ben Donovan 36:34
Yeah, that’s really good. And I think such a so important and underestimated truth. Because as soon as you start dealing with high volume campaigns and lots of keywords, each can get such a mess if you’re not organized, and have a structure of how he operates. I think yeah, that’s absolutely key. Thank you.
Michael Facchin 36:53
There’s so many issues, like there’s so many things like that in life. I was with someone one time. And it was at the end of the day, it was like 9pm. And he took out his laptop and he started writing emails. I’m like, What are you doing reading emails, like, we stopped working hours ago. It was like, oh, at the end of the day, I always write thank you notes to everyone I talked to today. He’s like, I’m not that smart. He’s like, something along the lines of like, I’m not that smart. But this is so easy to get people to like, you’re just like, that’s insane. And like, it’s such like an easy thing to do is like, oh, yeah, just like, thank people for taking the time to talk to you. And it’s like, everyone loves this guy.
Ben Donovan 37:30
Yeah, yeah, that’s class, stuff like that. Amazing. Good stuff. Okay. Well, honestly, this has been super insightful. And I know our listeners are gonna get so much out of it. It’s clear that you do spend a lot of time dug into this in the trenches. Where can people find out more about you about Ad Badger?
Michael Facchin 37:47
Yeah, you know, we’ve got over 250 episodes all about Amazon advertising, so people can search PPC Den like the Badger den PPC den, on their podcast platform of choice and find us or then go to adbadger.com to learn a little bit more about what we do professionally.
Ben Donovan 38:03
We’ll make sure we get those linked up in the show notes and description as well. Michael, thank you for taking the time out. This has been a super valuable episode.
Michael Facchin 38:12
Awesome. Ben. Have a good one!
Ben Donovan 38:13
Awesome. Thanks, guys for listening to this episode. I hope you got as much out of that as me. I got lots to work on. I’m sure you do too. But did you want to ask for the next episode? Same time next week. Take care guys. Bye bye
