62. Quartile’s Bradley Davis: The Truth About Amazon PPC Automation
/
RSS Feed
There’s no denying that Amazon PPC has become a more time-consuming endeavor over the years.
As more and more brands advertise on Amazon, it’s no longer a simple set and forget ad platform.
Instead, savvy Amazon sellers need to lean into advanced strategies and automations to save time and make their resources go further.
In this latest episode of The Brand Builder Show, we sit down with Bradley Davis from Amazon PPC automation experts Quartile to discuss:
- How Amazon PPC automation really works
- The growth benefits of automation in all areas of business
- What aggregators like Thrasio are doing differently with Amazon PPC
- And much more!
If you want to level up your Amazon PPC game, don’t miss this episode!
Episode Links
Talking Points
00:00 Introduction to Guest: Bradley Davis
01:17 Background of Bradley Davis and Quartile
05:00 Brad’s favorite five
10:50 Concept of PPC Automation
12:55 Business size and threshold before exploring PPC Automation
14:20 Advice to people who are afraid of moving to automation
17:20 More about Quartile’s approach on campaigns
23:45 Pros and cons of Quartile vs an agency
25:36 Advertising strategy for Quartile’s successful clients
27:12 Brad talks about their new product
31:09 Thoughts on AI’s future developments
35:52 Final thoughts on PPC and Quartile
37:29 Where to find Brad
Ben Donovan 00:00
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the brand builders show. And today’s episode is going to be all about Amazon PPC, PPC automation, AI, robots. You name it. We’re going to talk about it’s going to be good. And to talk about that. I’ve got my friend Bradley, from Quartile on the show today. Bradley, welcome to the show.
Bradley Davis 00:20
Yes, thank you. I’m super excited to be here. longtime listener,
Ben Donovan 00:26
longtime listener, first time guest. Yes. It’s good to have you on. And we’re going strong in our hat game. today. You are showing me up on the hat front. I need to sort of expand my repertoire. It’s impressive that, but But no, thank you for joining us. I’m excited to talk through some of this. And we’ll try not to talk too much about football or soccer as it’s called in America. Because we’ve discovered recently that we are rivals in the football fan world. You’re a Liverpool fan. Oh, I’m a united fan. So let’s just not talk about that at all. Because you absolutely spanked us recently. And that could be embarrassing for me. But no, I would love to hear about you. Just give us a bit of your background. You know, what you’re doing with Quartile what brought you there? And then we’ll dive into some some PPC stuff.
Bradley Davis 01:17
Yeah, for sure. So hi, everyone. I’m Brad Davis, Director of Partnerships here at Quartile. So I kind of manage everything from tech partnerships to ecosystem partners, and then like, customer and affiliate referrals as well. That’s what I do at quartile. But I My background is in marketing, specifically SAS for SAS businesses, but my passion is in like community building, particularly in the E commerce landscape. So what you won’t see on my LinkedIn is kind of the side things and my passion projects that are more related to, to e commerce. But yeah, I kind of started by I had a class in university as an entrepreneurship class where we had to create a, an actual business and generate revenue. And the business I created was a print and production company. So I was, you know, going into businesses and saying, Hey, I, you know, I could produce your swag, what we call swag in the US, like your conference handouts and things like that. And during the course of the class, you know, I think we did like 10k in revenue, which is, which is small, but for like a two month window, I think it was successful.
Bradley Davis 02:42
Yeah. But that kind of like launched my entrepreneurship. And then specifically like the E commerce kind of aspect of it. From there, I kind of started in in college, I started a small apparel company where I’d go to thrift stores in ad buy vintage fabric, and then like, incorporate that into blank T shirts to like pockets and other unique designs, started selling this. And in that process, I got, I had to take my own product photography. So photography became a big passion of mine. And I think that’s what really launched me to get into quartile. Because through that kind of photography, passion, I started doing lifestyle. photography work for brands like Tevez and Neff, headwear Camp Chef me undies, so that gave me like the insight into this ecommerce landscape. And it’s something that I’ve been really passionate about since and I’ve always wanted to be in the software side of it. And so when the Quartile opportunity came along, I jumped at the chance to be in Yeah, yeah.
Ben Donovan 04:00
Yeah, it is quite a unique software. And I think that’s why I was really keen to have you on to talk about some of the unique angles of PPC you know, as the you know, the topic of conversation so much at the moment here, especially on Twitter, at least in my little bubble anyway, it’s like I almost want to give Twitter a bit of a break at the moment because there’s just so much talk about you know, AI and what’s going on. But obviously that is a big part of marketing a big part of the way the world’s going and you guys are doing a lot of that so that’s going to be interesting timely, which we’ll get into we do just do a quick lightning round before we get started as well just to hear from you on some of your favorite things to a learn more about you but be get some inspiration that we can all take away as brand builders and what we can utilize in our business to grow some more. So favorite five number one, do you have a favorite ecommerce brand
Bradley Davis 04:59
Oh, yes. Have you heard of poler before? P-O-L-E-R. It’s kind of an outdoors. An outdoor brand. They partner with Nike they do like tents and sleeping bags and things like that. They did. Like one of my crowning kind of like marketing pieces of collateral that I had love. And I still like watch to this day is this collaboration that polar did with Nike, where they just, they got a couple of skateboarders together and put them on this like private yacht, and touring the Adriatic Sea and Croatia, and they just go to like different Croatian towns and just skate and you have the backdrop of like, Croatia Renji. It’s, it’s like, I love it. And it’s Yeah, everyone has to go check that out. But super cool, Brandon.
Ben Donovan 05:56
Yeah, very cool. Very cool. Sounds good. All right. Do you have a favorite software or tool that helps you run your business? Other than Quartile obviously.
Bradley Davis 06:05
Yeah. This one, this one was really hard for me. I probably gonna have to just do like a week generic answer. Slack or like, WhatsApp is I’m getting way more into WhatsApp, which I think Americans don’t really use WhatsApp. But like in the in this space, especially the Amazon space, I feel like WhatsApp is like the go to. And so I’m using that more and more in terms of like, in my partnership role with, you know, we have global global partners where I have to stay in touch with and so WhatsApp is becoming more popular for me using on a daily basis.
Ben Donovan 06:51
Do you use Slack in Quartile internally?
Bradley Davis 06:56
Yeah. And that’s one thing that’s helped from a partnership standpoint. And like, is we have specific Slack channels within our organization for our different partners. And I find it so much easier to communicate rather than like, typically, it’s just like you’re sending emails back and forth. And it’s, it’s harder to collaborate, I think on a partnership standpoint. And Slack has made it really easy to just have different quick answers and, and quick intros to mutual customers and things like that.
Ben Donovan 07:31
Yeah. Yeah, we run all our comps on Slack. It’s so rare now for us to email between our team, it’s all on Slack. So it’s super helpful. Love it. What about marketing? Have you got a favorite organic marketing channel?
Bradley Davis 07:46
Yeah, so my passion is community building. So anything that kind of facilitates community collaboration, so in person events I love but then also, I’ve seen like, a ton of success with Facebook groups or Whatsapp group, WhatsApp groups. I think, you know, as we’re talking about AI, I think it’s, it’s important for us to like not lose the personalization and like the that the human touch the in person touch like this, and I think community groups in those spaces are really important to foster.
Ben Donovan 08:25
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Okay. And what about paid marketing channel?
Bradley Davis 08:28
Yeah. I don’t have a particular favorite. All I’ll say is that the one where your audience lives in breeze? That’s, that’s the channel you should be on?
Ben Donovan 08:35
Yeah definitely. And that does differ, doesn’t it a lot from brand to brand. Yeah, sure. Yep. For sure. Yeah. Good answer. Good answer. And finally, do you have a favorite business book?
Bradley Davis 08:52
Yeah. So I wanted to talk about two. There’s one called Damn Good Advice by George Lewis. He’s a famous art director. He led some of the biggest, you know, art, I mean, creative eight ad agencies. That’s a really good book. And then my other favorite is The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk. Which I think speaks to kind of this whole community aspect of is that like, you, particularly as a business as a service provider, like you have to provide value first. Before you can really like ask for anything in between. Ask for anything afterwards. So I’m big on creating value. Big on creating a space where just the community can thrive.
Ben Donovan 09:43
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Good stuff. Well, thank you for those good, good inspiration, especially those two books for for brand builders, especially, you know, getting their heads around how to really create stuff that connects with an audience is really key. So thanks for those Good. All right. So PPC, obviously, it’s a big topic of conversation for the podcast for our community, PPC in general, but you guys got caught out live and breathe in the world of PPC automation. Right. And so it’s obviously something that is I don’t want to say controversial, but some people will be really pro automation. Some people think that the only an Excel spreadsheet and bulk edits will do, you know, so there’s lots of kind of back and forth on the topic. But if you could just bring any guests, any sorry listeners that are listening up to speed that maybe don’t know, what PPC automation might be, can you kind of explain what the whole concept of automating PPC optimization is?
Bradley Davis 10:50
Yeah, I definitely think there’s different layers or levels of it that you see in the market right now. You know, I think some of the, some of the base layers are kind of rule based optimization where, you know, brands can input rules that, that typically they’ve, you know, they’ve found that have worked for them, when it comes to, you know, promoting keywords or ASINs, depending on clicks, thresholds, or conversion rates, like that’s, I think that’s one layer above kind of the manual aspect of it. And then I think, another layer on top of that level, on top of that is getting into kind of machine learning in an AI, which is like, finding opportunities where maybe a human wouldn’t think there is opportunities. When it comes to, you know, automated advertising or listing creation, or campaign creation, or keyword bidding, like there’s, there’s a bunch of different layers there. But I think the key to AI machine learning is, is exploiting opportunities where a human either doesn’t have the bandwidth to do because, you know, they’re working maybe eight hours a day. Or it’s expanding to audiences and keywords that maybe humans have bias towards. And, and sometimes we fall into traps of, you know, we’re, we’re stuck in a lane, we think that this is what our audience is doing, or this is the keywords we should be looking at. But sometimes we have to expand outside of it to find some good opportunities. And I think AI is great at doing that. Because it’s just looking at data, there’s no bias to it, right?
Ben Donovan 12:37
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Do you do you see that there is a threshold of business size that people need to get to before they can start exploring this stuff? Because, you know, you say, data testing, I’m thinking costs, you know, what does that look like?
Bradley Davis 12:53
Yeah, so what we see in the Quartile and you know, Quartile’s on that, that upper level of kind of machine learning and AI is that a million dollars in annual sales is kind of the threshold that we see. And, and that threshold is kind of based on just the the amount of data that the you know, the automation can can intake to then, like, find value out of it. So it’s kind of a data level that you need a certain amount, but a million dollars is what we’re seeing is is kind of the minimum threshold.
Ben Donovan 13:33
Okay. And then there would be some people that are listening, especially at that level of sales, that would be nervous about handing things over, you know, maybe they’d been running things manually in Seller Central, which just makes me shudder. But, you know, maybe they’d have been doing things that you did to be fair, I actually, I tried doing bulk edits with spreadsheets recently. And actually, once you get the hang of it, it’s not as hard and complicated as it sounds, and it can speed things up a lot. But there’s still a lot of manual labor in there. But there will be people that will be nervous about moving over to automation, because they’d be worried about the AI running off with loads of spend. What do you generally say to people that find themselves in that position?
Bradley Davis 14:18
Yeah, I think, I think you really have to weigh like, what’s the opportunity cost of not doing it? In terms of, you know, a human has kind of a maximum level of output, whether that’s the hours that they’re working, or you know, a business owner has a ton of different aspects of the business that they need to manage as well. And so yeah, I think it’s really like what the opportunity cost of not doing and as well as you know, I think we’re seeing this with the adoption of AI across multiple verticals. You know, Chat GPT is like, you know, your competitors certainly are using automation. And so yeah, I think you need to be doing it, I think the opportunity definitely outweighs some of the risks. But, you know, with that in mind, you know, I think it really helps to be able to, if you have a defined strategy that’s working, like the AI is just there to help support the proven strategy you’ve already, you’ve already built that success that we’ve seen.
Ben Donovan 15:29
Yeah, definitely. I think the point you speak to as well, with regards to the limitations, you know, being being time, you know, time is one of the biggest limiting factors. And I think, the uniqueness of Quartile’s proposition is really, you know, speaking into that, because it, especially the way and I obviously, I don’t know how much you can sort of go into and how much of it is kind of under the hood, patented secret, because I know, you guys have got patents on some of your, you know, machine learning, as much as you’re able to talk about, I mean, just love to geek out on that. A little bit. Just cool. But at the same time, you know, your approach is very much your single keyword campaigns, you know, pumping out loads and loads of these things. Because as PPC has gotten more evolved, it’s gotten more complex, it’s not as easy to just run one or two campaigns and be successful, be profitable, you need to get more granular to have more control. And quartile, obviously, that’s the USP or Quartile is this granular control, which is almost impossible. I tried when trying to set up single keyword campaigns right across our PPC account and doing bulk edits to do that. And it’s honestly a nightmare. I completely backed out after the whole week, because I’m like, This is too much to dominate in my week. And that is where obviously the value comes with Quartile. But yeah, can you give us some insight into that? The the approach, I suppose, is it a single keyword campaign? You know, is that the approach? Or is that just the outworking of the theory behind it? Is it Yeah, can you give us some thoughts on that? Hopefully, that’s kind of made sense. I feel like I’ve rambled there.
Bradley Davis 17:11
Yeah. Yeah. So when you did your test, how many like ASINs were you working with?
Ben Donovan 17:18
I think I just tried on three?
Bradley Davis 17:20
Um, three? Yeah. So it just three products was a nightmare for you, you know, you look at brands that have 100 200,000 products, like trying to do that manually is definitely impossible. But yeah, the default kind of out of the box quartile is a single ace and single key, single keyword single campaign, single match type approach we get, we get very granular to kind of isolate all the, all the variables in it. So that’s kind of the default approach. I think that has allowed us to scale pretty significantly with a lot of our brands. That being said, you know, we just, we just announced some product launches that allow you allow a brand or an agency to kind of bring in whatever campaign structure that they want into corte and then just be able to layer on kind of the AI on top of that. So we’re getting a lot more flexible, because we know that there are there brands there sellers out there that have very unique approaches. And that have, it’s been successful for them. But yeah, kind of the out of the box methodology that we have is let’s get as granular as possible so that we can actually see which variables are working. We can’t, we had a one of our sales reps use an anecdote the other day that was like, you know, if you’re looking at a math equation that has three different variables, and you look at that, like as a campaign, if you have three different keywords in that campaign, you’re kind of treating all the keywords as the same type of variable, but they’re not in that equation they have they have different outputs. And so being able to isolate that allows us to, to look at that individual variable and then and then see if it’s been effective or efficient, or if it’s not,
Ben Donovan 19:16
yeah. On setup Quartile comes in and creates like hundreds of campaigns, right for a single ASIN. Which is just bonkers to the traditional mindset of PPC, but that, like you say, that gives you so much more granular control. And I can imagine that’s where so much of the power is.
Bradley Davis 19:37
Yeah, 100% That’s exactly right.
Ben Donovan 19:40
Yeah. The, like I said, The patented kind of stuff. What does it look like? How do you even pattern like code isn’t code or what’s the, you know, I know you can’t sort of tore everything but how does that work?
Bradley Davis 19:55
Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really have a good answer on that. I can get back to you. I think there’s elements of like, how we’re, how we’re like, what the campaign structure actually is. I think there’s elements of that, that have been patented. But I can get back to you and how to know if you want to include that in the show notes or whatever.
Ben Donovan 20:19
Yeah, no, I mean, it’s not like, I don’t think, you know, Amazon sellers are sitting at home thinking, I must know how this all works. But it’s just I think it’s fascinating that you can, you know, because we all understand the idea of patenting a product, you know, getting a utility patent for a product, and then to see a software, it’s got patterns, I think I’m interested in more so because it shows us something uniquely powerful about the software. And so it’s yes, it’s fascinating, really, you guys have been working with some big aggregators, like, you know, Thrasio is a big name obviously, gets thrown around the industry. And they’ve utilized that, you know, the functionality of Quartile, what’s that journey been, like working with some of these, you know, big, big companies?
Bradley Davis 20:42
Yeah, Thrasio has been has been a great customer, I think, you know, when, when we look at them, and some of our larger agencies, it, it’s helpful, because, you know, the scale that they that they’re working on, allows us to have really good product feedback, and be able to, like, you know, make product changes and kind of drive the product towards what they need at scale. I mean, their SEO has over 200 brands. And so, you know, you’re getting kind of the insights, over 200 brands with without having to talk to 200 brands individually, you know, we have this, this kind of one partner with Thrasio. So, you know, some of our latest product launches have been driven by, you know, brands, like for Thrasio. And some of our other agencies like the king, you know, like I said, before, you know, we can kind of ingest any kind of campaign structure now. And then you can start toggling on and off to AI features that you want. So that’s one aspect. And then we also have white label and self service options as well, which has been driven by through SEO. And then also, you know, we were just announcing, you can now do rule based optimization on top of AI as well. And so I think, like, kind of the the product feedback, iteration has been really helpful having having those guys as a part of our customer base,
Ben Donovan 22:42
definitely, are they using it in any different way to a single brandwood?
Bradley Davis 22:52
So Thrasio, and our larger agencies are definitely using it from a self service standpoint. But, you know, I, I would say most of our single brands are using our managed service components. Just because, you know, they don’t have as much of the bandwidth, they would rather focus on high level strategy and things like that. And our team is there to kind of help support and implement strategy or product launches and things like that.
Ben Donovan 23:23
And if you were to compare Quartile versus an agency, someone’s, you know, thinking about sourcing their PPC, they want someone to help them with it. There’s an agency that would do it, or there’s quartile like what’s, what’s the kind of pros and cons of each of those? It can quartile basically just replaced the agency with a managed service? What does that look like?
Bradley Davis 23:45
So you know, Quartile is not an agency, we’re a SaaS platform like our, our fees are our billing is flat fee month, a month. So we very, very differently than an agency. And we have a lot of agencies that are using our tech to, you know, as their as their PPC offering. So I think it just depends on what you want out of agency as a brand, like we’re obviously not an agency. So we don’t do we don’t do listing optimization, or creative or anything like that. So there may still be, you may still have a need that you want that all in house. But like, what we see is that the agencies that are using quartile to run their PPC are, are being very successful. I mean, yeah, I mean, so our for example. You know, our kind of account managers, depending on the scale of the brand can manage anywhere between 10 to 15 brands, which is kind of unheard of from an agency perspective. So, for an agency that wants to scale Oh, and onboard new clients without having to bring on new PPC managers or things like that like quartile is a great fit, because we can like optimize the output of your existing account managers.
Ben Donovan 25:13
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. In terms of like your most successful clients, like you guys would have case studies of growing brands, and is there anything unique that they are doing with their advertising strategy? Are they just turning quartile on and shooting for the moon? Or is there anything else that they’re adding into the mix there that our listeners might be able to learn from?
Bradley Davis 25:36
Yeah, for sure. So I think the baseline is that they are maximizing kind of all the opportunities that exist within, you know, the Amazon search products of PPC. And then from there, they’re layering on Amazon DSP, they’re taking a bottom up approach and in terms of like, the sales funnel, so you know, focusing on performance at the bottom, and then working their way up as they nail the bottom of the funnel down to then expanding new audiences, and new opportunities. So we’re seeing brands that are jumping to DSP, like really have PPC locked in first. And then starting with a performance based look at DSP, and then working their way up. So that’s one and then and then also, I think our, our most successful brands are also diversifying channels, they really have a good understanding of where their audience is buying their products or similar products. And then and then going into those channels and being and look, looking at it from an efficiency standpoint, from a performance standpoint.
Ben Donovan 26:51
Yeah, good. Good. Salvo the, you mentioned a couple of times about the new product that you’ve been working on it and just kind of announced and got, you know, did a sort of like a big launch for recently. Can you just talk to us more about that, and how that’s helping. Tell us?
Bradley Davis 27:12
Yeah, you know, I mentioned kind of the default methodology of, you know, the one to one granular campaigns. And, you know, the feedback that we’ve had from customers is that a certain customers is that they, they want more flexibility to be able to you know, how to navigate within their strategy with with more flexibility. And so, you know, this product launch is an iteration of us listening to our customers and say, Alright, take the take the great things about AI, and then be able to layer on, you know, the strategy that you’ve been able to see successful. So, campaign import, where you can bring in any kind of campaign structure that you want, and then be able to toggle on and off AI components that you want has been, it’s been a great thing for, particularly for agencies, we see a lot when an agency on boards that, you know, they don’t want to throw their playbook out the window. And before, you know, kind of courts have kind of made them have to do that. But now we have complete flexibility.
Bradley Davis 28:25
And then the other component of that is, is the rule based optimization, some some anecdotal stories is, you know, we have brands that maybe have a CMO that, you know, when he searches for their product, he wants them to be top of search, like no matter what, no matter the efficiency, you know, it’s kind of discount like, you know, that, I don’t want to say ego, but it’s just like that, that brand presence, no matter what the it doesn’t, they don’t care how much you’re spending, they want to be top of search. And and before this kind of new product launch, that really wasn’t possible because Quartile’s looking for efficiency. So now with the political product, the new product launch, you can kind of layer whatever rules based optimizations that you want, depending on clicks or conversion rates or, you know, other parameters like that. So, yeah, I think overall, it’s just flexibility to be able to support the the different successful strategies that Amazon sellers, and DTC brands have had. Aspect of that and to kind of tie back into our larger brands is that you know, Amazon is, is really focusing on Amazon Marketing Cloud right now. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about that.
Ben Donovan 29:49
Definitely
Bradley Davis 29:50
Yeah. So they’re, they’re really exposing more data when it comes to, like customer journey and path to purchase data on Yeah, and so that that’s something that our larger brands are really focused on. And so we’re rolling that out into our platform as well. So, you know, that’s, that’s a little bit of the the product launch. And then also, just what are you what are successful sellers that are using to kind of become more efficient is more looking at more data, understanding their customer more understanding the path of purchase more, utilizing that to be more efficient and to find new audiences. So that’s been a game changer, for sure.
Ben Donovan 30:37
Nice. Nice. And what further developments Do you see? Both in the industry? You know, and with court? I mean, obviously, the AI conversation will continue to rumble on what have you, where do you see the industry going? You know, are there any other major developments you see happening? Is it going to just is it now a case of just minimal gains, you know, diminishing returns with AI? Or are we gonna see some more revolutionary things come through?
Bradley Davis 31:09
Yeah, it’s been interesting to watch, I think, over the past couple of months with introduction of chatGPT, right. Like you know, AI is definitely on the forefront of people’s minds, then it’s been funny, because we’ve been, we’ve been pushing AI and PPC automation for a few years now. So it’s interesting to see, like, everyone be hyped about it, we definitely saw that prosper, there was, you know, quiet, you know, it’s a quite a few service providers in the Amazon space that have launched, you know, accessory products, off chat, GPT, like listing optimization, and things like that, which is exciting to see. In terms of the future, I think we’re gonna see more of it, I think one things that’s exciting to see is AI being used in a creative, which create, you know, creative, can be hard to do. Sometimes, testing creative can be hard. And I’ve seen really great things coming out of like, me journey, I don’t know, if you if you’ve seen mid journey, but like, you know, AI, content and creative generation. You know, I, I think so in building a brand, I think so much of creative can be like subjective. You know, what is the CMO? Like, what is the art director like, or you know, whatever. But I think having data to drive creative strategy is like, very exciting from an AI perspective, because it converts or it doesn’t convert. And so it kind of cuts the bullshit out of this color looks better this, you know, whatever.
Ben Donovan 33:01
Yeah, definitely. I think it’s good as well. I’m realizing, you know, over recent weeks, as people talk about how this is going to revolutionize and how this is going to put some people out of a job is a bit of hyperbole, I think but at the same time, it will change the way the workforce looks. But ecommerce as a whole, I don’t think is going to be threatened by AI because, you know, if someone wants to buy a dog bowl for their dog, you know, AI is not going to be able to replace that. And that’s where we can get so caught up in our own marketing and online business world. I saw someone I think maybe on Twitter the other day, you know, they did a screenshot of the texted someone sent their friend a message saying, Do you know what chat GPT is? And they’re like, No, I’ve not heard of it. And they were just, you know, not an old person or anything, they were just kind of like a you know, similar age to us. And they just not even heard of it. So it’s, it’s easy to get wrapped up in this, you know, bubble that we’re in. But I think e commerce is one of the industries that is going to be accelerated by it. And it’s going to be very much used in E commerce as you guys would, as you’ve said, You’re big proponents of it already for a few years. But it’s it’s not something that threatens the industry as such, which I think is is really exciting, you know?
Bradley Davis 34:24
Yeah, I think I think like new products are often new and good products are often solutions to like human problems. So I don’t really see that ever. That kind of innovative mentality for human problems. I don’t necessarily see that being impacted by AI like for example, you know, we have a customer that creates these cereal cups that like, allow you to eat cereal on the go in a cup. But it’s like said like The bottom is like milk and then there’s like a container at the top that has cereal and is you drink like, like, I don’t like AI is not going to be able to come up with that. Because it’s it’s definitely a human problem. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Ben Donovan 35:16
I’m not sure it’s even a problem. But yeah, I can, such a funny product. It’s good.
Bradley Davis 35:24
You’re not on the go kind of guy.
Ben Donovan 35:27
I’ve never done it. But you know, maybe I’ll give it a go. Now, you’ve mentioned that. Now, that’s mad. Good. Anything else to add? Before we kind of start to wrap up Brad’s been super insightful, and, you know, lots to sort of research and learn from this. But is there anything? Any sort of final thoughts on AI PPC, automation Quartile or anything else you want to add?
Bradley Davis 35:52
Um, I mean, I think, you know, from a business perspective, I think you, you really need to start looking at, you know, what are the opportunity costs for not, you know, not automating some of this stuff, there’s, there’s so much benefit to efficiency to, to human man hours that you can gain from automation, and your competitors are doing it 100%. So there’s definitely an opportunity cost down for not doing that. So keep in mind
Ben Donovan 36:26
100% Agree, the amount of, you know, granular view, you need to have have things out, and the time that takes to manually manage your time is the asset. And, yes, definitely, people need to look at this stuff for sure. If they do want to look at it, obviously, we’ll leave a link to Quartile in the description below. We’re there at the moment, I don’t know how long you guys will offer it for about a time of recording is still doing, like a special offer for the first couple of months. And so we’ll link in the description for people to save a bit of money as well.
Bradley Davis 36:58
Yeah, for sure. And specific to your audience is 55% off for the first two months.
Ben Donovan 37:06
Good. I was we should have clarified it before. So I didn’t want to say that’s what I thought that’s what it was. I didn’t want to say it live on air. In case you correct them. Yeah, we stopped offering that. But that’s good. You’re still offering that. But obviously that could change in the future. So grab it while it lasts, guys. That’s good. We’ll leave that in there as well. If people want to connect with you as well. Where’s the best place to do that?
Bradley Davis 37:29
Probably on LinkedIn. I think Bradley C. Davis is my LinkedIn. That’s probably the best way.
Ben Donovan 37:37
Perfect. Yeah. And we’ll obviously leave a link for that in the description as generous as well. Final question, who’s gonna win the Premier League next Man United or Liverpool?
Bradley Davis 37:47
Next season or this season?
Ben Donovan 37:49
No, like who out of those two next to win it
Bradley Davis 37:56
I gotta go Liverpool. Man. I know.
Ben Donovan 38:06
You got your back your team.
Bradley Davis 38:08
You know, I, I do love seeing Rashford like, making his way back up to the top. Like, it’s such. From a sports fan perspective. It’s just it sounds like a beautiful story. Like, I don’t really know, maybe, you know, like, what has happened to him over the past years. But it seems like this season, definitely. Something’s different. And it’s really fun to see him kind of at top of his form.
Ben Donovan 38:34
Great, great comeback story for sure. Good stuff, we better leave it there. Otherwise, we’ll talk about that all day. Because it’s, we love it but of all leave. Leave that one there. And we’ll bring the focus back to BBC Brad. Honestly, it’s been really interesting conversation. There’s, I think so much more for this to develop into, you know, over the coming years. Automation AI is going to be obviously a massive part of our lives. Moving forwards and Amazon PPC is going to be no different. So yeah, thanks for coming on bringing your thoughts and sharing everything today.
Bradley Davis 39:10
Thanks so much, Ben.
Ben Donovan 39:12
No worries, good stuff. Alright guys. Well, thanks for joining us in this episode today. Check out all the resources down in the description. Check out Wuartile 55% off. Highly recommend getting a look at the product because it is a fantastic product, fantastic people and connect with Bradley, and we’ll see you in the next episode. Same time next week. Take care guys.
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the brand builders show. And today’s episode is going to be all about Amazon PPC, PPC automation, AI, robots. You name it. We’re going to talk about it’s going to be good. And to talk about that. I’ve got my friend Bradley, from Quartile on the show today. Bradley, welcome to the show.
Bradley Davis 00:20
Yes, thank you. I’m super excited to be here. longtime listener,
Ben Donovan 00:26
longtime listener, first time guest. Yes. It’s good to have you on. And we’re going strong in our hat game. today. You are showing me up on the hat front. I need to sort of expand my repertoire. It’s impressive that, but But no, thank you for joining us. I’m excited to talk through some of this. And we’ll try not to talk too much about football or soccer as it’s called in America. Because we’ve discovered recently that we are rivals in the football fan world. You’re a Liverpool fan. Oh, I’m a united fan. So let’s just not talk about that at all. Because you absolutely spanked us recently. And that could be embarrassing for me. But no, I would love to hear about you. Just give us a bit of your background. You know, what you’re doing with Quartile what brought you there? And then we’ll dive into some some PPC stuff.
Bradley Davis 01:17
Yeah, for sure. So hi, everyone. I’m Brad Davis, Director of Partnerships here at Quartile. So I kind of manage everything from tech partnerships to ecosystem partners, and then like, customer and affiliate referrals as well. That’s what I do at quartile. But I My background is in marketing, specifically SAS for SAS businesses, but my passion is in like community building, particularly in the E commerce landscape. So what you won’t see on my LinkedIn is kind of the side things and my passion projects that are more related to, to e commerce. But yeah, I kind of started by I had a class in university as an entrepreneurship class where we had to create a, an actual business and generate revenue. And the business I created was a print and production company. So I was, you know, going into businesses and saying, Hey, I, you know, I could produce your swag, what we call swag in the US, like your conference handouts and things like that. And during the course of the class, you know, I think we did like 10k in revenue, which is, which is small, but for like a two month window, I think it was successful.
Bradley Davis 02:42
Yeah. But that kind of like launched my entrepreneurship. And then specifically like the E commerce kind of aspect of it. From there, I kind of started in in college, I started a small apparel company where I’d go to thrift stores in ad buy vintage fabric, and then like, incorporate that into blank T shirts to like pockets and other unique designs, started selling this. And in that process, I got, I had to take my own product photography. So photography became a big passion of mine. And I think that’s what really launched me to get into quartile. Because through that kind of photography, passion, I started doing lifestyle. photography work for brands like Tevez and Neff, headwear Camp Chef me undies, so that gave me like the insight into this ecommerce landscape. And it’s something that I’ve been really passionate about since and I’ve always wanted to be in the software side of it. And so when the Quartile opportunity came along, I jumped at the chance to be in Yeah, yeah.
Ben Donovan 04:00
Yeah, it is quite a unique software. And I think that’s why I was really keen to have you on to talk about some of the unique angles of PPC you know, as the you know, the topic of conversation so much at the moment here, especially on Twitter, at least in my little bubble anyway, it’s like I almost want to give Twitter a bit of a break at the moment because there’s just so much talk about you know, AI and what’s going on. But obviously that is a big part of marketing a big part of the way the world’s going and you guys are doing a lot of that so that’s going to be interesting timely, which we’ll get into we do just do a quick lightning round before we get started as well just to hear from you on some of your favorite things to a learn more about you but be get some inspiration that we can all take away as brand builders and what we can utilize in our business to grow some more. So favorite five number one, do you have a favorite ecommerce brand
Bradley Davis 04:59
Oh, yes. Have you heard of poler before? P-O-L-E-R. It’s kind of an outdoors. An outdoor brand. They partner with Nike they do like tents and sleeping bags and things like that. They did. Like one of my crowning kind of like marketing pieces of collateral that I had love. And I still like watch to this day is this collaboration that polar did with Nike, where they just, they got a couple of skateboarders together and put them on this like private yacht, and touring the Adriatic Sea and Croatia, and they just go to like different Croatian towns and just skate and you have the backdrop of like, Croatia Renji. It’s, it’s like, I love it. And it’s Yeah, everyone has to go check that out. But super cool, Brandon.
Ben Donovan 05:56
Yeah, very cool. Very cool. Sounds good. All right. Do you have a favorite software or tool that helps you run your business? Other than Quartile obviously.
Bradley Davis 06:05
Yeah. This one, this one was really hard for me. I probably gonna have to just do like a week generic answer. Slack or like, WhatsApp is I’m getting way more into WhatsApp, which I think Americans don’t really use WhatsApp. But like in the in this space, especially the Amazon space, I feel like WhatsApp is like the go to. And so I’m using that more and more in terms of like, in my partnership role with, you know, we have global global partners where I have to stay in touch with and so WhatsApp is becoming more popular for me using on a daily basis.
Ben Donovan 06:51
Do you use Slack in Quartile internally?
Bradley Davis 06:56
Yeah. And that’s one thing that’s helped from a partnership standpoint. And like, is we have specific Slack channels within our organization for our different partners. And I find it so much easier to communicate rather than like, typically, it’s just like you’re sending emails back and forth. And it’s, it’s harder to collaborate, I think on a partnership standpoint. And Slack has made it really easy to just have different quick answers and, and quick intros to mutual customers and things like that.
Ben Donovan 07:31
Yeah. Yeah, we run all our comps on Slack. It’s so rare now for us to email between our team, it’s all on Slack. So it’s super helpful. Love it. What about marketing? Have you got a favorite organic marketing channel?
Bradley Davis 07:46
Yeah, so my passion is community building. So anything that kind of facilitates community collaboration, so in person events I love but then also, I’ve seen like, a ton of success with Facebook groups or Whatsapp group, WhatsApp groups. I think, you know, as we’re talking about AI, I think it’s, it’s important for us to like not lose the personalization and like the that the human touch the in person touch like this, and I think community groups in those spaces are really important to foster.
Ben Donovan 08:25
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Okay. And what about paid marketing channel?
Bradley Davis 08:28
Yeah. I don’t have a particular favorite. All I’ll say is that the one where your audience lives in breeze? That’s, that’s the channel you should be on?
Ben Donovan 08:35
Yeah definitely. And that does differ, doesn’t it a lot from brand to brand. Yeah, sure. Yep. For sure. Yeah. Good answer. Good answer. And finally, do you have a favorite business book?
Bradley Davis 08:52
Yeah. So I wanted to talk about two. There’s one called Damn Good Advice by George Lewis. He’s a famous art director. He led some of the biggest, you know, art, I mean, creative eight ad agencies. That’s a really good book. And then my other favorite is The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk. Which I think speaks to kind of this whole community aspect of is that like, you, particularly as a business as a service provider, like you have to provide value first. Before you can really like ask for anything in between. Ask for anything afterwards. So I’m big on creating value. Big on creating a space where just the community can thrive.
Ben Donovan 09:43
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Good stuff. Well, thank you for those good, good inspiration, especially those two books for for brand builders, especially, you know, getting their heads around how to really create stuff that connects with an audience is really key. So thanks for those Good. All right. So PPC, obviously, it’s a big topic of conversation for the podcast for our community, PPC in general, but you guys got caught out live and breathe in the world of PPC automation. Right. And so it’s obviously something that is I don’t want to say controversial, but some people will be really pro automation. Some people think that the only an Excel spreadsheet and bulk edits will do, you know, so there’s lots of kind of back and forth on the topic. But if you could just bring any guests, any sorry listeners that are listening up to speed that maybe don’t know, what PPC automation might be, can you kind of explain what the whole concept of automating PPC optimization is?
Bradley Davis 10:50
Yeah, I definitely think there’s different layers or levels of it that you see in the market right now. You know, I think some of the, some of the base layers are kind of rule based optimization where, you know, brands can input rules that, that typically they’ve, you know, they’ve found that have worked for them, when it comes to, you know, promoting keywords or ASINs, depending on clicks, thresholds, or conversion rates, like that’s, I think that’s one layer above kind of the manual aspect of it. And then I think, another layer on top of that level, on top of that is getting into kind of machine learning in an AI, which is like, finding opportunities where maybe a human wouldn’t think there is opportunities. When it comes to, you know, automated advertising or listing creation, or campaign creation, or keyword bidding, like there’s, there’s a bunch of different layers there. But I think the key to AI machine learning is, is exploiting opportunities where a human either doesn’t have the bandwidth to do because, you know, they’re working maybe eight hours a day. Or it’s expanding to audiences and keywords that maybe humans have bias towards. And, and sometimes we fall into traps of, you know, we’re, we’re stuck in a lane, we think that this is what our audience is doing, or this is the keywords we should be looking at. But sometimes we have to expand outside of it to find some good opportunities. And I think AI is great at doing that. Because it’s just looking at data, there’s no bias to it, right?
Ben Donovan 12:37
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Do you do you see that there is a threshold of business size that people need to get to before they can start exploring this stuff? Because, you know, you say, data testing, I’m thinking costs, you know, what does that look like?
Bradley Davis 12:53
Yeah, so what we see in the Quartile and you know, Quartile’s on that, that upper level of kind of machine learning and AI is that a million dollars in annual sales is kind of the threshold that we see. And, and that threshold is kind of based on just the the amount of data that the you know, the automation can can intake to then, like, find value out of it. So it’s kind of a data level that you need a certain amount, but a million dollars is what we’re seeing is is kind of the minimum threshold.
Ben Donovan 13:33
Okay. And then there would be some people that are listening, especially at that level of sales, that would be nervous about handing things over, you know, maybe they’d been running things manually in Seller Central, which just makes me shudder. But, you know, maybe they’d have been doing things that you did to be fair, I actually, I tried doing bulk edits with spreadsheets recently. And actually, once you get the hang of it, it’s not as hard and complicated as it sounds, and it can speed things up a lot. But there’s still a lot of manual labor in there. But there will be people that will be nervous about moving over to automation, because they’d be worried about the AI running off with loads of spend. What do you generally say to people that find themselves in that position?
Bradley Davis 14:18
Yeah, I think, I think you really have to weigh like, what’s the opportunity cost of not doing it? In terms of, you know, a human has kind of a maximum level of output, whether that’s the hours that they’re working, or you know, a business owner has a ton of different aspects of the business that they need to manage as well. And so yeah, I think it’s really like what the opportunity cost of not doing and as well as you know, I think we’re seeing this with the adoption of AI across multiple verticals. You know, Chat GPT is like, you know, your competitors certainly are using automation. And so yeah, I think you need to be doing it, I think the opportunity definitely outweighs some of the risks. But, you know, with that in mind, you know, I think it really helps to be able to, if you have a defined strategy that’s working, like the AI is just there to help support the proven strategy you’ve already, you’ve already built that success that we’ve seen.
Ben Donovan 15:29
Yeah, definitely. I think the point you speak to as well, with regards to the limitations, you know, being being time, you know, time is one of the biggest limiting factors. And I think, the uniqueness of Quartile’s proposition is really, you know, speaking into that, because it, especially the way and I obviously, I don’t know how much you can sort of go into and how much of it is kind of under the hood, patented secret, because I know, you guys have got patents on some of your, you know, machine learning, as much as you’re able to talk about, I mean, just love to geek out on that. A little bit. Just cool. But at the same time, you know, your approach is very much your single keyword campaigns, you know, pumping out loads and loads of these things. Because as PPC has gotten more evolved, it’s gotten more complex, it’s not as easy to just run one or two campaigns and be successful, be profitable, you need to get more granular to have more control. And quartile, obviously, that’s the USP or Quartile is this granular control, which is almost impossible. I tried when trying to set up single keyword campaigns right across our PPC account and doing bulk edits to do that. And it’s honestly a nightmare. I completely backed out after the whole week, because I’m like, This is too much to dominate in my week. And that is where obviously the value comes with Quartile. But yeah, can you give us some insight into that? The the approach, I suppose, is it a single keyword campaign? You know, is that the approach? Or is that just the outworking of the theory behind it? Is it Yeah, can you give us some thoughts on that? Hopefully, that’s kind of made sense. I feel like I’ve rambled there.
Bradley Davis 17:11
Yeah. Yeah. So when you did your test, how many like ASINs were you working with?
Ben Donovan 17:18
I think I just tried on three?
Bradley Davis 17:20
Um, three? Yeah. So it just three products was a nightmare for you, you know, you look at brands that have 100 200,000 products, like trying to do that manually is definitely impossible. But yeah, the default kind of out of the box quartile is a single ace and single key, single keyword single campaign, single match type approach we get, we get very granular to kind of isolate all the, all the variables in it. So that’s kind of the default approach. I think that has allowed us to scale pretty significantly with a lot of our brands. That being said, you know, we just, we just announced some product launches that allow you allow a brand or an agency to kind of bring in whatever campaign structure that they want into corte and then just be able to layer on kind of the AI on top of that. So we’re getting a lot more flexible, because we know that there are there brands there sellers out there that have very unique approaches. And that have, it’s been successful for them. But yeah, kind of the out of the box methodology that we have is let’s get as granular as possible so that we can actually see which variables are working. We can’t, we had a one of our sales reps use an anecdote the other day that was like, you know, if you’re looking at a math equation that has three different variables, and you look at that, like as a campaign, if you have three different keywords in that campaign, you’re kind of treating all the keywords as the same type of variable, but they’re not in that equation they have they have different outputs. And so being able to isolate that allows us to, to look at that individual variable and then and then see if it’s been effective or efficient, or if it’s not,
Ben Donovan 19:16
yeah. On setup Quartile comes in and creates like hundreds of campaigns, right for a single ASIN. Which is just bonkers to the traditional mindset of PPC, but that, like you say, that gives you so much more granular control. And I can imagine that’s where so much of the power is.
Bradley Davis 19:37
Yeah, 100% That’s exactly right.
Ben Donovan 19:40
Yeah. The, like I said, The patented kind of stuff. What does it look like? How do you even pattern like code isn’t code or what’s the, you know, I know you can’t sort of tore everything but how does that work?
Bradley Davis 19:55
Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really have a good answer on that. I can get back to you. I think there’s elements of like, how we’re, how we’re like, what the campaign structure actually is. I think there’s elements of that, that have been patented. But I can get back to you and how to know if you want to include that in the show notes or whatever.
Ben Donovan 20:19
Yeah, no, I mean, it’s not like, I don’t think, you know, Amazon sellers are sitting at home thinking, I must know how this all works. But it’s just I think it’s fascinating that you can, you know, because we all understand the idea of patenting a product, you know, getting a utility patent for a product, and then to see a software, it’s got patterns, I think I’m interested in more so because it shows us something uniquely powerful about the software. And so it’s yes, it’s fascinating, really, you guys have been working with some big aggregators, like, you know, Thrasio is a big name obviously, gets thrown around the industry. And they’ve utilized that, you know, the functionality of Quartile, what’s that journey been, like working with some of these, you know, big, big companies?
Bradley Davis 20:42
Yeah, Thrasio has been has been a great customer, I think, you know, when, when we look at them, and some of our larger agencies, it, it’s helpful, because, you know, the scale that they that they’re working on, allows us to have really good product feedback, and be able to, like, you know, make product changes and kind of drive the product towards what they need at scale. I mean, their SEO has over 200 brands. And so, you know, you’re getting kind of the insights, over 200 brands with without having to talk to 200 brands individually, you know, we have this, this kind of one partner with Thrasio. So, you know, some of our latest product launches have been driven by, you know, brands, like for Thrasio. And some of our other agencies like the king, you know, like I said, before, you know, we can kind of ingest any kind of campaign structure now. And then you can start toggling on and off to AI features that you want. So that’s one aspect. And then we also have white label and self service options as well, which has been driven by through SEO. And then also, you know, we were just announcing, you can now do rule based optimization on top of AI as well. And so I think, like, kind of the the product feedback, iteration has been really helpful having having those guys as a part of our customer base,
Ben Donovan 22:42
definitely, are they using it in any different way to a single brandwood?
Bradley Davis 22:52
So Thrasio, and our larger agencies are definitely using it from a self service standpoint. But, you know, I, I would say most of our single brands are using our managed service components. Just because, you know, they don’t have as much of the bandwidth, they would rather focus on high level strategy and things like that. And our team is there to kind of help support and implement strategy or product launches and things like that.
Ben Donovan 23:23
And if you were to compare Quartile versus an agency, someone’s, you know, thinking about sourcing their PPC, they want someone to help them with it. There’s an agency that would do it, or there’s quartile like what’s, what’s the kind of pros and cons of each of those? It can quartile basically just replaced the agency with a managed service? What does that look like?
Bradley Davis 23:45
So you know, Quartile is not an agency, we’re a SaaS platform like our, our fees are our billing is flat fee month, a month. So we very, very differently than an agency. And we have a lot of agencies that are using our tech to, you know, as their as their PPC offering. So I think it just depends on what you want out of agency as a brand, like we’re obviously not an agency. So we don’t do we don’t do listing optimization, or creative or anything like that. So there may still be, you may still have a need that you want that all in house. But like, what we see is that the agencies that are using quartile to run their PPC are, are being very successful. I mean, yeah, I mean, so our for example. You know, our kind of account managers, depending on the scale of the brand can manage anywhere between 10 to 15 brands, which is kind of unheard of from an agency perspective. So, for an agency that wants to scale Oh, and onboard new clients without having to bring on new PPC managers or things like that like quartile is a great fit, because we can like optimize the output of your existing account managers.
Ben Donovan 25:13
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. In terms of like your most successful clients, like you guys would have case studies of growing brands, and is there anything unique that they are doing with their advertising strategy? Are they just turning quartile on and shooting for the moon? Or is there anything else that they’re adding into the mix there that our listeners might be able to learn from?
Bradley Davis 25:36
Yeah, for sure. So I think the baseline is that they are maximizing kind of all the opportunities that exist within, you know, the Amazon search products of PPC. And then from there, they’re layering on Amazon DSP, they’re taking a bottom up approach and in terms of like, the sales funnel, so you know, focusing on performance at the bottom, and then working their way up as they nail the bottom of the funnel down to then expanding new audiences, and new opportunities. So we’re seeing brands that are jumping to DSP, like really have PPC locked in first. And then starting with a performance based look at DSP, and then working their way up. So that’s one and then and then also, I think our, our most successful brands are also diversifying channels, they really have a good understanding of where their audience is buying their products or similar products. And then and then going into those channels and being and look, looking at it from an efficiency standpoint, from a performance standpoint.
Ben Donovan 26:51
Yeah, good. Good. Salvo the, you mentioned a couple of times about the new product that you’ve been working on it and just kind of announced and got, you know, did a sort of like a big launch for recently. Can you just talk to us more about that, and how that’s helping. Tell us?
Bradley Davis 27:12
Yeah, you know, I mentioned kind of the default methodology of, you know, the one to one granular campaigns. And, you know, the feedback that we’ve had from customers is that a certain customers is that they, they want more flexibility to be able to you know, how to navigate within their strategy with with more flexibility. And so, you know, this product launch is an iteration of us listening to our customers and say, Alright, take the take the great things about AI, and then be able to layer on, you know, the strategy that you’ve been able to see successful. So, campaign import, where you can bring in any kind of campaign structure that you want, and then be able to toggle on and off AI components that you want has been, it’s been a great thing for, particularly for agencies, we see a lot when an agency on boards that, you know, they don’t want to throw their playbook out the window. And before, you know, kind of courts have kind of made them have to do that. But now we have complete flexibility.
Bradley Davis 28:25
And then the other component of that is, is the rule based optimization, some some anecdotal stories is, you know, we have brands that maybe have a CMO that, you know, when he searches for their product, he wants them to be top of search, like no matter what, no matter the efficiency, you know, it’s kind of discount like, you know, that, I don’t want to say ego, but it’s just like that, that brand presence, no matter what the it doesn’t, they don’t care how much you’re spending, they want to be top of search. And and before this kind of new product launch, that really wasn’t possible because Quartile’s looking for efficiency. So now with the political product, the new product launch, you can kind of layer whatever rules based optimizations that you want, depending on clicks or conversion rates or, you know, other parameters like that. So, yeah, I think overall, it’s just flexibility to be able to support the the different successful strategies that Amazon sellers, and DTC brands have had. Aspect of that and to kind of tie back into our larger brands is that you know, Amazon is, is really focusing on Amazon Marketing Cloud right now. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about that.
Ben Donovan 29:49
Definitely
Bradley Davis 29:50
Yeah. So they’re, they’re really exposing more data when it comes to, like customer journey and path to purchase data on Yeah, and so that that’s something that our larger brands are really focused on. And so we’re rolling that out into our platform as well. So, you know, that’s, that’s a little bit of the the product launch. And then also, just what are you what are successful sellers that are using to kind of become more efficient is more looking at more data, understanding their customer more understanding the path of purchase more, utilizing that to be more efficient and to find new audiences. So that’s been a game changer, for sure.
Ben Donovan 30:37
Nice. Nice. And what further developments Do you see? Both in the industry? You know, and with court? I mean, obviously, the AI conversation will continue to rumble on what have you, where do you see the industry going? You know, are there any other major developments you see happening? Is it going to just is it now a case of just minimal gains, you know, diminishing returns with AI? Or are we gonna see some more revolutionary things come through?
Bradley Davis 31:09
Yeah, it’s been interesting to watch, I think, over the past couple of months with introduction of chatGPT, right. Like you know, AI is definitely on the forefront of people’s minds, then it’s been funny, because we’ve been, we’ve been pushing AI and PPC automation for a few years now. So it’s interesting to see, like, everyone be hyped about it, we definitely saw that prosper, there was, you know, quiet, you know, it’s a quite a few service providers in the Amazon space that have launched, you know, accessory products, off chat, GPT, like listing optimization, and things like that, which is exciting to see. In terms of the future, I think we’re gonna see more of it, I think one things that’s exciting to see is AI being used in a creative, which create, you know, creative, can be hard to do. Sometimes, testing creative can be hard. And I’ve seen really great things coming out of like, me journey, I don’t know, if you if you’ve seen mid journey, but like, you know, AI, content and creative generation. You know, I, I think so in building a brand, I think so much of creative can be like subjective. You know, what is the CMO? Like, what is the art director like, or you know, whatever. But I think having data to drive creative strategy is like, very exciting from an AI perspective, because it converts or it doesn’t convert. And so it kind of cuts the bullshit out of this color looks better this, you know, whatever.
Ben Donovan 33:01
Yeah, definitely. I think it’s good as well. I’m realizing, you know, over recent weeks, as people talk about how this is going to revolutionize and how this is going to put some people out of a job is a bit of hyperbole, I think but at the same time, it will change the way the workforce looks. But ecommerce as a whole, I don’t think is going to be threatened by AI because, you know, if someone wants to buy a dog bowl for their dog, you know, AI is not going to be able to replace that. And that’s where we can get so caught up in our own marketing and online business world. I saw someone I think maybe on Twitter the other day, you know, they did a screenshot of the texted someone sent their friend a message saying, Do you know what chat GPT is? And they’re like, No, I’ve not heard of it. And they were just, you know, not an old person or anything, they were just kind of like a you know, similar age to us. And they just not even heard of it. So it’s, it’s easy to get wrapped up in this, you know, bubble that we’re in. But I think e commerce is one of the industries that is going to be accelerated by it. And it’s going to be very much used in E commerce as you guys would, as you’ve said, You’re big proponents of it already for a few years. But it’s it’s not something that threatens the industry as such, which I think is is really exciting, you know?
Bradley Davis 34:24
Yeah, I think I think like new products are often new and good products are often solutions to like human problems. So I don’t really see that ever. That kind of innovative mentality for human problems. I don’t necessarily see that being impacted by AI like for example, you know, we have a customer that creates these cereal cups that like, allow you to eat cereal on the go in a cup. But it’s like said like The bottom is like milk and then there’s like a container at the top that has cereal and is you drink like, like, I don’t like AI is not going to be able to come up with that. Because it’s it’s definitely a human problem. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Ben Donovan 35:16
I’m not sure it’s even a problem. But yeah, I can, such a funny product. It’s good.
Bradley Davis 35:24
You’re not on the go kind of guy.
Ben Donovan 35:27
I’ve never done it. But you know, maybe I’ll give it a go. Now, you’ve mentioned that. Now, that’s mad. Good. Anything else to add? Before we kind of start to wrap up Brad’s been super insightful, and, you know, lots to sort of research and learn from this. But is there anything? Any sort of final thoughts on AI PPC, automation Quartile or anything else you want to add?
Bradley Davis 35:52
Um, I mean, I think, you know, from a business perspective, I think you, you really need to start looking at, you know, what are the opportunity costs for not, you know, not automating some of this stuff, there’s, there’s so much benefit to efficiency to, to human man hours that you can gain from automation, and your competitors are doing it 100%. So there’s definitely an opportunity cost down for not doing that. So keep in mind
Ben Donovan 36:26
100% Agree, the amount of, you know, granular view, you need to have have things out, and the time that takes to manually manage your time is the asset. And, yes, definitely, people need to look at this stuff for sure. If they do want to look at it, obviously, we’ll leave a link to Quartile in the description below. We’re there at the moment, I don’t know how long you guys will offer it for about a time of recording is still doing, like a special offer for the first couple of months. And so we’ll link in the description for people to save a bit of money as well.
Bradley Davis 36:58
Yeah, for sure. And specific to your audience is 55% off for the first two months.
Ben Donovan 37:06
Good. I was we should have clarified it before. So I didn’t want to say that’s what I thought that’s what it was. I didn’t want to say it live on air. In case you correct them. Yeah, we stopped offering that. But that’s good. You’re still offering that. But obviously that could change in the future. So grab it while it lasts, guys. That’s good. We’ll leave that in there as well. If people want to connect with you as well. Where’s the best place to do that?
Bradley Davis 37:29
Probably on LinkedIn. I think Bradley C. Davis is my LinkedIn. That’s probably the best way.
Ben Donovan 37:37
Perfect. Yeah. And we’ll obviously leave a link for that in the description as generous as well. Final question, who’s gonna win the Premier League next Man United or Liverpool?
Bradley Davis 37:47
Next season or this season?
Ben Donovan 37:49
No, like who out of those two next to win it
Bradley Davis 37:56
I gotta go Liverpool. Man. I know.
Ben Donovan 38:06
You got your back your team.
Bradley Davis 38:08
You know, I, I do love seeing Rashford like, making his way back up to the top. Like, it’s such. From a sports fan perspective. It’s just it sounds like a beautiful story. Like, I don’t really know, maybe, you know, like, what has happened to him over the past years. But it seems like this season, definitely. Something’s different. And it’s really fun to see him kind of at top of his form.
Ben Donovan 38:34
Great, great comeback story for sure. Good stuff, we better leave it there. Otherwise, we’ll talk about that all day. Because it’s, we love it but of all leave. Leave that one there. And we’ll bring the focus back to BBC Brad. Honestly, it’s been really interesting conversation. There’s, I think so much more for this to develop into, you know, over the coming years. Automation AI is going to be obviously a massive part of our lives. Moving forwards and Amazon PPC is going to be no different. So yeah, thanks for coming on bringing your thoughts and sharing everything today.
Bradley Davis 39:10
Thanks so much, Ben.
Ben Donovan 39:12
No worries, good stuff. Alright guys. Well, thanks for joining us in this episode today. Check out all the resources down in the description. Check out Wuartile 55% off. Highly recommend getting a look at the product because it is a fantastic product, fantastic people and connect with Bradley, and we’ll see you in the next episode. Same time next week. Take care guys.
