014: Brian R Johnson's Expert Insights on Amazon Advertising, Algorithm Secrets, and Sales Growth Strategies

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome everyone to the Brand Fortress HQ podcast. I'm your host, john Stogin, and we also have our co-founders for Brand Fortress HQ here, mike Kaufman and Matt Atkins, joining us for this episode. Our guest today is Brian R Johnson, who is the co-founder of Deep MAI Technologies, who also has been involved in the Amazon space for a long, long time and been one of the big experts in the space. In fact, one of the things I know Brian most for is I actually started out in one of his courses, learning PPC myself kind of back in the day. So, brian, I know you've been really involved in the Amazon space and been a thought leader for a long time. But for people that maybe aren't familiar with you, can you share a little bit of your backgrounds and kind of how you got involved in the Amazon and where you're at today and kind of everything that you're involved in?

Speaker 2: 0:51

Yeah, of course. No, that is actually. That is something that is actually pretty fun is when people have never heard of me. I love that more than anything. To be honest, within the space obviously outside of Amazon, nobody could care. So I've been in e-commerce for 17 years now and there's a little bit of pain that I feel in that because that's a long time.

Speaker 3: 1:17

Well, I've been in e-commerce for 30 years. There you go, there you go.

Speaker 2: 1:20

I was a little bit of a limerick. I'm not a limerick. I've been in the Amazon space for the last 10 years, yeah. And primarily the way that I started out was I had a buddy of mine that pulled me in who was building, he was selling like cell phone cases and he was doing crazy numbers for back then. And he pulled me in and I went to my when I had launched my first product, went through the whole sourcing thing had like a kitchen tool. It wasn't a garlic peeler, but I had a kitchen tool and I was selling it and it was selling pretty good. I'm like, oh man, I'm gonna have to reorder because it's selling through. And I went to my first amazing conference in Austin, texas, and there was like I don't know, 600, maybe a thousand people in the room and I remember I was sitting in the audience and one of the guys up on stage it was Jason Flaley and, for those who know him, he goes. Yeah, he goes. Amazon is so easy. He's like nobody's got their listings correct. You know this is back in the day when you could pretty much do anything and do better. And he goes. Look at all these examples. And he starts bringing up examples of different products and different categories and, sure enough, he brings up my number one direct competitor, because this niche is just wide open. Oh, I thought he was gonna pull out the earlick thing. It was just as bad, because here's what happened. So, in a room of a thousand people, apparently 40 people were not that creative and within two months, I had 40 new competitors. Just like, ah, lots of him. And so I, you know, I was still. That was my early years of trying to figure out that it's like, okay, I actually can innovate, I can, you know, develop something, you know, bring something new to market. And so I said, oh, let me figure this out, let me, you know, what's missing here is this cleaning brush. Six months later, everybody had that same cleaning brush. So I started seeing the pattern, like, okay, you get caught in six months, no problem, you know, you're done if you haven't moved forward in the last, you know, a few months. And so one of the things that, well, I was doing, that I wanted, you know, my first product and I had. I've had a number of other product partnerships and brands and products that I've built myself. You know, some are hit and miss, you know, like, like, if I were to start today, yeah, I would kill it, you know, and I do that with some of my partner brands that I work with. But, yeah, obviously the knowledge has come so far in the day. In part, frankly, I mean I had to admit is that one of the things that I did was that because I had an early opportunity to figure out that the big week spot, the big blue ocean, was Amazon advertising and that there wasn't any software, there was no training available from Amazon or anybody else, nobody was really speaking about it, nobody was really troubleshooting, collaborating on it. You know it just there wasn't any good advice out there. But I needed that, not only to grow my own products, but also I had a friend of mine who actually had an 800 SKU Beauty brand on Amazon way too many SKUs, but trying to help them, you know, build that. And so I had my head around this Amazon advertising thing back in its infancy. When I figured out it's like okay, there's nothing out there, no training, no software and you know nothing. Let me go ahead and start a community, let me start a Facebook group and we'll just, like, I'll talk with you know 20 people. That group has 22,000 people in it now. But what that did was it actually became I didn't know it at the time, but it actually became the catalyst for me being forced to master the Amazon advertising material, because what would happen is that people would come in and they'd start joining in. Of course, they had a question like hey, I'm trying to troubleshoot this. What is? You know how do I answer this? You know it'd be crickets, right. So I'd have to go out, I'd figure out what the answer is and I'd reply Well, I kept on doing that and after a while, if you always have the answer for everybody who asks at some point, you can no longer step away from that. You're forced to always have the answer which is a good thing from a like hey, I'm atop of my game as far as understanding what's going on, but I also like to experiment so I could reach out. But at the same time, you could never not have the answer. I've never been. I've never had a problem with saying like you know what I don't know. You know, I'm not gonna just make up an answer just because somebody asked a question that I don't know. Like, if I don't know, it's like I don't know, but I'm curious to find out, you know, and so I'll research it that what that did. Is it kind of built almost like my Amazon community character in this? I realized, okay, what's missing? You know people are saying, like man, I wish I could. You know, I'm spending eight hours. You know, a week, you know doing this, you know doing my campaigns manually editing everything. I'm like, screw that, like I can't do that with my own. So came out with the first software. It was horrific. Which I think is kind of a general rule is that if you're not embarrassed by the first product that you I'm out with, you're too late. And I was embarrassed. It was ugly, but I had, you know, within a year I had 4,000 sellers who were using it and it was just, it was train wreck, but we approved it greatly. That was PPC scope, back in the day, 2015, maybe 14, 15, so we're on there, yeah. Next opportunity came up when it came to training. I didn't know at the time, but I had met one of my previous business partners. We had started a sponsor products academy to do training and then, later on, canopy management, which was the agency. Both of those have had a lot of success. Both PPC scope and sponsor products academy have been gobbled up by competition and other offerings out there and not updated and therefore it was shuttered. Both of those were acquired and shuttered and so canopy management still is rolling strong, you know, growing like crazy, but I recognize certainly is it okay? We're back in this space where something's missing, something has to change, something's gotta give, because the ad costs are only gonna continue to go up and the biggest challenge that people are saying is like well, advertising is just a cost to do in business. Like I've gotten to reject that, even though I'm the big proponent of advertising. I had to reject those kind of statements because I'm like no, that just screams a lack of innovation. So I partnered up with my current partner for DBM and we he had already started developing the technology. I helped to advance it and we advanced a lot in the last year and a half to the point where we now have this system. That essentially is a big data approach. So it goes out and it will crawl an entire product niche and look at hundreds of different data points. The combinations of that, along with third party API data and additional analysis, we get some of these reports it's analyzing. We had one. Our biggest one so far is 28 million data points that we're analyzing for one product niche. So it is a lot to put that in perspective. I actually figured this out and that is it would take. It said that a million data points, analyzed correctly, would take a thousand man hours to do. Per million data points. Do it manually. So 28,000 man hours, which I'm never gonna spend that in any one niche, I'm not gonna spend that. You know I've already spent 10,000 hours on Amazon as a whole. I'm not gonna do that as a product. But we found out some really interesting insights because not only were we able to reverse engineer because we had so much data to tell us what the patterns were, we were able to reverse engineer how A9 behaves differently for organic ranking of products for each product niche, which I didn't realize that it handled it differently. So we were able to break that down. And there's a lot of other things that we continue to find as we do more and more research. But ultimately, where we're at today is we've got a select group of beta testers and we're essentially we're helping, we're pointing them in the right direction as far as, like, here are the search terms that you can rank your products for. Here's what it's gonna take in order to get there, and it's not simply just advertising, it's knowing exactly like okay, 40% of your effort needs to be put in the title, 22% of your effort needs to be put on the bullets, 18% needs to be put into PPC. Here's the PPC that's actually going to work in this case. It's that specific and so what? That gives them the ability to do not only the initial pass, I guess, but to say, okay, here's the direction of points. But every single week and every single month, we're going back and say, okay, here's what's changed in the competitive space. You've got three other direct competitors that change their title slightly and that create a little more resistance, and so you're not as strong as you were a week ago. Here's how you adjust. So it's this fine tuning based off of this big data analysis, that gives us a hyper detailed situational awareness of a product niche unlike anything that's out on the market today, and I will absolutely geek on this. I could be on here for three hours talking about it, frankly.

Speaker 1: 11:51

So cut it off there. Yeah well, let's double click on a couple of things there, I think the first one for people that may not eat, sleep and breathe Amazon, especially Amazon a logarithm. When we're talking about A9, you're talking about the logarithm that Amazon actually uses to determine how to rank products. Is that Correct? Yes and no there's no A10.

Speaker 2: 12:15

Which is a whole nother discussion. There isn't A8 though.

Speaker 1: 12:20

Okay, which is a whole nother probably a discussion for another time but yeah, I think that's important to point out as well. So I think there's a couple of things there. First of all and you kind of alluded to it and I just wanna maybe dig a little bit deeper on it is this idea of because I mean, see some of the same things where, of course, ad costs are going up. If we look at how much brands are spending on ads, things have gotten a lot more competitive over the last couple of years and the trend is that it's going to get more competitive and, quite frankly, those costs are gonna continue to rise and you do have to have some amount of advertising on Amazon. So when you say, hey, I don't need to continue to go along, or a brand doesn't need to continue to go along with that trend, what does that alternative look like, based on what you're seeing from the data sets, right?

Speaker 2: 13:15

Yeah, that is absolutely true. Is that? That's kind of where my I wanna be part of that resistance movement send like no, we're gonna do something different. I'm not really that rebel, I'm just that much of a geek that's willing to research and say like I think I can do that better. But ultimately you're absolutely correct. Is that there's a point of reason where, when brands have will regularly say it's like well, advertising is just a cost to doing business. Now it's like okay, yeah, but how are you using it? It's like well, to grow ad sales? It's like no that's just no, because if it's just to grow ad sales, then your only focus is on dialing in a cost. You know return on ad spend, you know you're only, you're tweaking things, which is fine. If you're a quartile or something like that and want to, you know, adjust like little, you know bids and that kind of stuff, cool, go for it. But in order to get what you're actually going for, which is I want to increase sales for my brand, I want to. In order to do that, I need to get higher visibility of my product, and while I'm also working on increasing conversion rate of my product and so the visibility is, yes, you can spend money on advertising. It's very common for brands to spend 30, 40% of, you know, 30%, 30, 40% of their total sales come from ads. That's way too high. It should be. You should be less than that, because it definitely needs to be more focused on what is this producing for you? What's the end result here? What's the what's? What's your goal here? Is it just to continue to run a break even campaign or a slightly profitable campaign in order to get those sales, or is it to actually position yourself? And the idea had always been is that well, if you run advertising and I've said you know, I've spoken this myself is you can run very specific, targeted advertising on individual keywords, and that can improve your organic ranking. True, but the problem with that is is it actually going to do that, do you know, before you spend a bunch of money? And in most cases, no, most cases it's an experiment of like let me spend a bunch of money and I'm going to optimize it along the way and I'm hoping that it's going to increase my organic ranking. But I don't know for sure Because I don't know everything that goes into what it takes for a nine to determine. Did it increase my sales velocity enough in order to lift up my organic ranking? And it's a contributing factor, but by no means is it the full story. And so just increasing unit sales velocity and participating in Amazon's ad platform is not enough by itself. So then it begs good.

Speaker 3: 16:24

Can I ask a couple of questions then? So let's say you know along those lines, so would you say at this point, because of the way the Amazon game has changed and it's possible that the answer could be obviously a little self-serving, because obviously you have deep end but I still curious what your thoughts are on it. Are we entering into territory where, if you want to effectively compete on Amazon and you want to say, minimize the ad expense, like you only want to be utilizing the ad expense that's necessary? Are we in a space where that this you know, high level big data type situation is really the only next logical step in that progression in order for us to separate ourselves from competitors and be able to actually do that, or are there other ways that we can accomplish that same? thing, Do we need it? Yes, yes.

Speaker 2: 17:21

Yes, and Michael, having watched your other shows, I knew that you were. I was hoping that you'd come through with some of the you know the hard questions here on this to challenge me, so I appreciate that, thank you. There are multiple ways in order to accomplish the goal, but really it's figuring out what the exact sequence and combination is that is correct for your product within your competitive set, within your subcategory, within your product niche. That's the level of detail that you need to know. That's the information you need to have. There are things that we see it's like well, this is what's working now. Well, what's working now is usually what is what is actually changing organic rank or increasing sales or visibility. If you recall, you know back in the day, is it? You know, like the rebate giveaway was very popular. It still happens today. It's just not as public it's. But that is a version of gaming the system, because you are essentially, you're artificially increasing the sales velocity for a product and, yes, that does have an impact. But I can tell you, based on the stats you're talking, maybe 20, 25% impact on the algorithm with that sales velocity, which is a lot less than we had always thought it was. We always thought that sales velocity was the number one factor when it came to Amazon ranking products in organic search for different search terms. It's not, however. Everything feeds off of each other. In other words, there's no one magic bullet, but you can have one thing that compensates for something. It's one thing that's strong that compensates for something else that's weak. As an example of that, let's say, your product listing doesn't have a specific phrase, a search phrase, in the content at all. It's not in the title, it's not in the bullet, it's not you know anywhere, and so you're weak on relevance. On content relevance, you're in the category where that search term is relevant and so you will have that pairing, but your listing itself may not have that specific, that exact search term that you want to rank for. But then you go out and use something like TikTok ads or Shop or Rebate Giveaway or something, in order to drive through sales on a product that is specifically using some kind of a URL that has an embedded search term, let's say right, right or wrong. As far as whether or not you'll get caught using that, that's a different argument. But if you drive enough sales, either through PPC advertising or through off-Amazon sales, to a specific search term, you can essentially offset the weaknesses you have everywhere else, but what that requires you to do is you're constantly now investing either in PPC or off-Amazon sales or a combination of both. You know Giveaways, that type of thing. That's also one of the reasons why, historically, most of the Rebate Giveaway promotions that you would do yes, you would get up to page one, but what happens a month later?

Speaker 1: 20:39

So you do it Almost every time you see it jump off. Yeah, Exactly.

Speaker 3: 20:43

So then, I would say that it sounds to me like one significant benefit of a big data set, you know, analyze system like what you have is that it potentially allows you to find those weak points that are essentially free to change, versus using the tools that we often end up using as a crutch to address those which cost money. So we get to find those three options that we can improve in less than the expense on the other side of the crutch.

Speaker 2: 21:18

Exactly Now. There is a challenge here because there is there's only so much space in content. Let's say, for instance, like one of the things that we definitely see and it's not going to be any surprise is that having the exact search phrase you're going after in your title just part of this has a large contribution on organic ranking on Amazon. But there's a couple of problems with that. One is you can only fit so much content into the title, right, so there's only so many terms that you can go after. You can do different word combinations to try to get Amazon to see relevance with. You know five to 10 different search terms. You know using, you know a combination of word stuff. You know keyword stuff, title, but then you know ultimately you probably have to make it make up for that with. You know you'd want to drive additional unit sales velocity through PPC or off Amazon sales If you. That's the point I'm trying to get to on this is that if you build up enough of the combination, it may be easier for you. In other words, if you focus in on, like, say, four or five terms that you can put into your primary content fields or product listing, then that's probably enough If you're trying to go after 100 different search terms, that becomes a bigger challenge. In other words, you're going to have to pick your battles. Now where this helps is also knowing where. What are the strengths and weaknesses of every single product in my competitive set or within my product niche entirely that are going to give me an advantage. If I've got 50 competitors who are super strong in all these factors and they've optimized for this specific search term, you're going to have a difficult time taking over page one. You know top 10, top five organic position because everybody else is already optimized for that search phrase. Now that may be a very lucrative search phrase and so ultimately, long-term, it may be worth to invest into taking that over and holding it. But Amazon is going to build trust and put you there from an organic ranking standpoint based off consistency of you having your listing optimized for those target search terms and driving unit sales velocity to those specific search terms. And if you start and stop or if you're constantly changing, you constantly break that trust and you'll never increase your organic ranking because you're moving too much. You're moving the targets too much. You've got to have a certain amount of consistency over an extended period of time.

Speaker 3: 24:08

So that brings up a question for me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying. So you were mentioning the consistency. Are you referring to an overall consistency of your listing in terms of a generalized relevancy, or are you talking about consistency of a listing like in its entirety, like we shouldn't really be changing the listing regularly, like running, you know, split testing and things like like? What do you mean when you say consistency?

Speaker 2: 24:39

No. So with split testing, I do actually recommend you do If you're using Amazon experiments to do the round robin split testing. That's the only thing that's valid on Amazon. When it comes to split testing anyway, the and that's oftentimes the approach that you would do in order to mitigate risk of changing the title is to use the AB split testing through Amazon experiments. It moves a little slower, it takes longer in order to get trusted by Amazon and to build up that organic rank, versus if you just committed full time, committed 100%, to the new title. If you're doing split testing, then 50% of the time you're focused, you know so. In other words, you dilute it by half. But yes, it's a combination of what you're doing as far as to promote it. Where are you spending your ad dollars? When it comes to things like advertising off Amazon promotion, as well as your on page SEO, there are going to be, there's going to be sequence or a priority of the different fields. Right Title and bullets will certainly be in the top five as far as things that you should stay focused on when it comes to things like A plus content, a plus hidden content, classic description field spec. You know the specs content, backend, search term fields. These all have a contribution, but they may have a minor contribution compared to whatever Amazon is clearly favoring in that specific subcategory. So each subcategory has its own pattern. As far as where A nine emphasizes or has a much higher respect for certain features or data fields, that is using whether that's content, relevance or performance metrics for the products relative to your competition, and that could be things like sales velocity, price ratings, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 26:47

So, for brands that maybe don't have access to 25 million different data points for each category, what advice would you give them to at least start testing to take advantage of some of these different things that you're talking about, as far as what keywords that they might be able to get more juice out of and how to optimize their system and essentially play nicer with the A9 algorithm?

Speaker 2: 27:16

Yeah, I mean you may not have all the visibility to know that, well, in my category, price is weighted 11% and bullet points are weighted 23%. That kind of stuff that gives you more specific. You may not also have the visibility of what are the weak holes in my competition that I can exploit, which is what big data gives you, but there are some tried and true best practices in that. Don't rely on advertising as a whole to essentially make or break your product. Most brands focus in on their hero product and their sidekick products the number one and number two seller and oftentimes they neglect their other children, they neglect their other products and they forget to try to optimize them. What I would recommend doing is optimize each of your products for a different set of search terms so that you can get your product into a different. Now you can have overlapping search terms, of course, but try to don't just have your entire catalog focused in on the same set of keywords. Focusing the product listing optimization, so that there's more intention that this product is designed to get in front of this specific audience using this kind of search terminology, and talk to that audience accordingly. Certainly, things like chat, gbt and Claude certainly help you do that a lot easier as far as like coming up with a wording that is attractive and compelling. I am a huge, huge proponent of differentiating from your competition, stating right up front in your title, your main image and your bullet points what it is that's different about your product that people should know so that they could care.

Speaker 1: 29:17

I'm going to click through onto this product listing because they're doing something slightly different, slightly better the I'm just going to interrupt there because I think that's an important point to double click on as far as the conversation we're having is. So there's two different things, because what you just mentioned is really about speaking to the audience in the sense of saying how your product is or the benefit of your product is significantly better than your competition may not be a keyword, but it's incredibly important for your click-through rate and your conversion rate. Yeah Well, at the same time, you have to balance that with what keywords are really going to drive sales to make sure that you get the visibility that you need. How do you think about that? As far as prioritizing, when you only have let's just take the title On mobile, you've got about somewhere between 85 and 90 characters to catch their attention From a search perspective, depending on your category, 150 to 200 characters. How do you think about prioritizing both catching attention versus keywords and also even within keywords? I guess the second one there of it depends on how.

Speaker 2: 30:35

So we are certainly learning more and more that we implement what we learned from each subcategory and how it behaves differently. It is interesting. I would not have previously thought, but it goes back to an old school thought of let's say I've got 250 characters in my title, I should fill up all 250 characters. There's that school of thought. It was the opposite school of thought of have it very short. I used to always push back on no, don't have a short title, because that is too specific, too narrow and it doesn't give you a chance to really state the benefits to the shopper. Ultimately, there is organic ranking that's going to occur as a result of appeasing the algorithm, but ultimately, your conversion rate and your profitability and the profitability of your ads and your product is ultimately going to come down to how well are you connecting with the shopper and what their needs are, answering the question what's in it for me, to the shopper? And so differentiation from a title standpoint focusing in on the first 75 to 80 characters that are visible on mobile how are you going to hook the shopper when they're on their mobile phone, which more than half of them are Certainly. It used to be like they'd search on the mobile and then they'd buy on the desktop. Now it's all you've got. Probably 50, 60% of your search and purchase that's going to go through a mobile device. Now it may be higher than that, I'm not sure, but you only have a limited space that's showing of the title. So, yes, you can have a full 250 character title and then making sure that your first 75, 80 characters has not just maybe a relative search term, but also what is your differentiator, what's a compelling benefit or feature that is going to set your product apart from most of your competition. That's visible in order to get them either curious enough or like they see something that attracts them and say, oh, that's actually kind of what I want, that benefit or that actually is something I'm looking for. To click through to your product listing and then optimize your product listing to tell the story and to focus again on benefit, benefit, benefit supported by feature, feature, feature right, and so, throughout your secondary images and your bullet points and your A plus and everything it's always like, here's your reinforcing differentiation you're reinforcing the benefits of the product to that consumer and you're highlighting the features that make all that happen.

Speaker 3: 33:27

So, brian, I have a question for you. So I assume that DeepM has been in the process of development for a while now, I expect. I don't know exactly how much testing and case study work that's been done and how many beta testers you've got, but of what you have done for again, for listeners who may not necessarily be in a position to pay for big data, which is expensive, it's not inexpensive, we'll say, but it may be worth the price. Let's be clear. I mean, at the end of the day, it may be well worth the price, but for somebody who's like I don't know. Have you seen I mean, we know, from one niche to another, obviously, what your tool is going to tell a particular brand are. These are the areas you should highlight, because you got the best chance of making a significant impact with these three or four things. Whatever, are you seeing any patterns in terms of what things they want to focus on the most, brand to brand, niche to niche, that tend to ride high on that list? Because, for instance, we've been mentioning here, we know at least we believe, let's say we believe and there are certain things that the Amazon community assumes and I think are likely true, which is, the algorithm is going to pay very close attention to your conversion rate. It's going to pay. I think and this is something we've had conversations about I don't think enough people talk about is that Amazon, at the end of the day, is trying to make as much money for the X number of customers that come onto the platform each day as they can, and that means advertising costs, referral fees, fba fees, dsp, whatever, like all costs for a like. How can we make the most money on the most number of sales per day per X number of customers? So that can be what's your price point, because they're going to make a higher referral fee if they've got a higher FBA fee on that product. But, at the end of the day, conversion rate and CTR seem to be those two kind of North Star things that the algorithm would pay close attention to. What are those things that your data is showing should almost always be in that, say, top 10 of things that you're paying attention to?

Speaker 2: 35:58

Yeah, and certainly so. To kind of clarify too is that the A9 algorithm is primarily focused on the organic search results. The ad auction algorithm focuses more on the advertising. The A9 would definitely, certainly go off of conversion rate. It's definitely going to look at content relevance. Content relevance probably the number one thing that we see across most niches is title relevance stands out. It's probably the leading factor. Second to that would be the bullet points, the features. There's a number of. There's 25 other factors that get involved and all of those should be worked on right, but those are the top two that seem to come up most consistently across all the different case studies We've got. We've worked with probably 80 niches and probably across about 40 brands total. We can only are working on case studies with in order to grow their organic ranking and ultimately their sales, a lot more profitable than just ads. But yeah, from an organic, from an A9 organic rank standpoint, listing alignment definitely as far as relevance with the title and the bullet points definitely is more consistent. Right, it's not 100%, but it's definitely more consistent that probably those two, I would say, contribute probably 25 to 30% of the weight of the algorithm for A9. Now the ad auction will look at fields like the classic description field for relevance right, which A9 does not, and it will also be more focused on click through rate, and so if you're advertising, click through rate is important. Your classic product description even you know the classic product description that's often hidden by your A plus. Don't ignore that. That is directly relevant to whether or not your ads are going to get a show and whether it finds relevance. Now the ad auction also is going to look at things like bullet points in title. But it also funny enough is it does look at classic product description where A9 does not seem to. So that is kind of a differentiating factor there.

Speaker 3: 38:29

But I'd like to double click on that, because I think there are still, I would say, a large number of sellers including myself, to be quite frank who still are under the impression that the classic description field is paid attention to by the A9 algorithm. And so you know, making the assumption that you know, putting some key phrases in there would be of use in terms of ranking for the A9. Your suggestion would be that's not accurate.

Speaker 2: 39:00

Not based off of my observations. I'm always willing to be proven wrong. Glad to welcome that. The from a big data standpoint is classic. Description does not seem to be influencing the organic search that much. It would be a small percentage.

Speaker 4: 39:23

Okay. So, brian, with the data that you see, it sounds almost like you're saying that categories are different based on what the levers that there are to pool. Are you seeing that one category has a different lever that has a higher that you should prioritize higher than other, or do they? Are they all kind of same across categories?

Speaker 2: 39:50

No, no, that's kind of what I was saying is, for instance, title relevance is by far the one that is most consistent. We see it the most as the number one factor that influences the organic search algorithm across multiple categories. After that, that's when it starts breaking down. We do see, certainly recent unit sale velocity certainly comes into play. Bullet points those are kind of your top three that tend to co-mingle across different categories. Deepm was not originally designed to identify the differences in these features of a product listing and a product's performance. It was designed to find the holes for search term relevance. Data Dive, for instance, does this for, say, top 10 products or page one products. We go well beyond that. We're doing the entire thing. It's not just the top 10. It's not limited. If you use a Helium 10 or Data Dive, for instance. Great tools, they have some great features, but they're very narrow in their scope because, like you mentioned earlier, big data costs a lot of money. It really does. We're analyzing the entire niche. Even if you have a product that is sitting down in page five and you're struggling to figure out, well, how can I focus in on this product, trying to compete with page one, if I can't even get it past page five. We can tell you exactly how to move it from page five to page four, to page three, to page two and then ultimately to page one. It may take time in order to get to page one from a relevance and sales velocity standpoint compared to other products in the catalog, but it is definitely feasible. But DeepM was designed with the intent of identifying the holes in the competition that can be exploited where you've got competitors who are not strong from a content-relevant standpoint and a sales velocity standpoint on specific search terms. Like you know what a lot of your competition in this particular category is really weak on this search term. Yet that search term has value. Go ahead and optimize and go after aggressive advertising If you want to add on outside sales on that term. If you can drive that cool. But ultimately optimize for that. Get a page one organic ranking on that search term and then start building around that To the point where we can actually look and see okay, what are the different search terms? What's the minimum number of targeted search terms that we could rank on page one? Maybe top five of page one for across, let's say, eight to 10 search terms, for instance, those combination of those search terms. Not only can you, before you spend a dime doing any optimization or any kind of changes, it can predict yes, you can actually rank high for these. Here's exactly what your sweet spot is. You're going to be able to go at least you're going to move from position 38 to position 10 and potentially up to position five, but you're not going to get past position five because the competition is too strong above that. That's how accurate that is. What we can do is we can then combine those and say, okay, if you actually invest in a into these specific 10 search terms, now you're also going to get the best seller badge for that subcategory. You're not just hunting and packing and hoping that you're driving enough sales volume in order to win best seller badge. You actually know which terms that you can focus on. That circles back around to what should people do as far as they're advertising, as far as their product listing is focus, get down to that Pareto, that 20% is going to make a difference. Stop shotgunning your advertising out to everything. Get more narrow and more aggressive on the specific targets to serve a purpose, to get an end result, not simply just to advertise, to get advertised sales. That is a business methodology that has worked. These work for years. It's what I've always taught. But it can be very expensive for some product niches, for some subcategories. That can become too expensive and you've got to shift from hey, I'm just going to continue to throw money at advertising because I want the advertised sales. I want to focus my advertising and my SEO efforts into these specific targets because I want that organic ranking visibility. That's going to stick for one. But also I don't have to pay a bunch in advertising. I might have some maintenance advertising to help prop it up, but I don't need the advertising in order to get there in the first place. Ultimately, to those who can't afford big data, we're trying to make it accessible, of course, but certainly for smaller brands. Focus in on narrowing the target search terms that you're trying to rank for. That includes your advertising and your listing optimization. Narrow your focus and go after those.

Speaker 1: 45:26

It sounds like the advantage. Here again, going back to like a helium 10 will show you something like, hey, I need this much sales velocity in order to rank per a particular keyword, Whereas once you have big data, you have more of that granular control to say, hey, here's the combination that you need, whether that be keywords, and we get to the next level or even within the listing, as far as being in your title, being in your bullets, those types of things, in order to get where you want to go by being able to move those dials a lot more, as opposed to just kind of essentially open and closed, which is what we have with the sales velocity.

Speaker 2: 46:02

Sales velocity is a great metric. It really is, because it is definitely based off of my observation. It's probably the top three in the top three as far as weighted factors. In A9, in organic search it's only like one of 20 to 25 factors that could cumulatively contribute. You know the idea of, hey, let's go after a bunch of long tail search terms that don't have that much search volume but everybody else is weak on it. I can just jump in and just take over SEO on long tail search terms, but it's the cumulation of if I can get 50 of these long tail search terms. That's going to equal the search volume that some of my bigger competitors are having to pay through the nose in order to get. It's a similar kind of concept in that, yes, you can entirely focus on one or two factors to organically rank and that can influence your organic ranking, but it can be very expensive to get there and to stay there, versus if you now know what some of the other factors are and you work on some of these other factors, you become less reliant on those expensive things because you've got more situational awareness. You've got a bigger picture of you that says you know what I'm going to work on these five things that I ignored or I didn't emphasize much previously. I'm going to craft my let's say it's your bullet points. You need to work, you know. I'm going to craft my bullet points, I'm going to test my bullet points more and more and more and just constantly work on that, because I know that in my particular product niche that is a top three factor. That's probably a good effort for anybody, regardless if you've got access to big data, title bullet points. And then, of course, you know sales velocity. But I do see too many times where new brands they try to come out and launch and they'll spend a huge amount of money and time thinking that they're going to rank in the top of page one against the 800 pound gorillas that have 50,000 reviews. Like good luck, you know. Like, yeah, you can show up for a while as long as you're paying through the nose in order to be there, but whether you stick there, as soon as you back off on whatever that promotion is in order to game the system, you're going to fall off because you're weak in all these other doctors that they have strong on that you didn't even know, you weren't even aware of. So it's no longer. It's not back. It's not the Wild West days where it's like well, just do one thing, one factor, focus on this one thing, you'll win.

Speaker 1: 48:50

There's no, golden BB, it's really we're letting it out of this I said there's no golden BB, there's no one magic solution where I'm going to win Amazon, especially at this point.

Speaker 2: 49:01

But if you find that one of these top things are just too expensive to play in and you're thinking about like, well, I need to get out of this product line, that may not actually be the case. What it may be the case is your listings and your product performance are weak in other areas that you have the ability to approve. Things like the uprising of the negative, the one star review mitigation, one star review removal services, for instance, from a review negative review mitigation standpoint. You know that may only contribute 6% to the weight of the organic search algorithm, but if you're the only one that focused on that, you could you, if you just correct that one thing that has this small contribution call it a long tail factor, if you will that has a small contribution to the overall, you know, organic search algorithm. That could be just enough be the tipping point that it puts you 10, 20, 30 competitors ahead, just by tweaking one little thing that we might previously dismiss because, oh, that's just a minor thing, I'm not going to focus on that. Yes, but it may be the tipping point that puts you ahead of everybody else who absolutely is just failing on that one factor. If you do a little bit better than them. Then now, all of a sudden, you've got a 6% advantage.

Speaker 3: 50:29

Well, and I think it's also important to point out that there are certain factors that are compounding factors you know. So like let's take negative reviews right, like Amazon themselves, take into account your review profile as a primary factor. Like it's there, like now. The percentage that it attributes is, you know, debatable, but it is a primary contributor, I think, to A9 ranking. But it's a secondary contributor in the sense that, depending on what the rest of the category looks like for your product, addressing that will potentially move both your click-through rate and your conversion rate as compared to all your competitors, if you can get those negative reviews down, which then flywheels and spins that algorithm more, because now other factors that are a part of that algorithm are now being affected by that. One thing that you focused on, that nobody else did.

Speaker 2: 51:22

Yeah, Well, there's a couple of things that we have observed and one of them was, just like yesterday, we discovered, so you know, one of the things that what we've known for a while now is on because the organic search algorithm called A9, because A9 places a different weight on the different contributing features and factors of a product listing and its performance. On a specific subcategory, specific product niche, you can craft your product listing and its performance based off of what is heavily weighted. So like, say, price, for instance, may be one of the compelling factors in a commodity product. You know, if you're selling toilet paper, then other than maybe one ply, two ply, you know, known brand name price is usually, you know, as a commodity item. Price is probably going to drive that. The machine learned behavior of the consumer is they seem to keep on buying the products that are the lower price. Therefore it gets a higher. It's going to start weighting price as the driving factor in that specific subcategory. Now, if you go to something like Rolex watches, which I don't actually think sells on Amazon, but let's say there's a category for expensive Rolex watches, you can be sure price is not the driving factor. Review, rating and review history and that profile for reviews is going to be probably the number one factor that is going to drive conversion attention. And in Amazon, A9 knows that because it's been machine learned to observe that most consumers will take time reading through reviews. Therefore it must have this huge contribution to actually making a purchase. And I see a question then, because that brings up an idea.

Speaker 3: 53:32

Well, I don't know if it's an idea, but it relates to my category. So we sell pool cleaning tools which, to be honest, is very much a commodity category At least, it's become that, you know, especially with the influx of so many Chinese sellers. I mean, it's been that for a long time, but it's even worse now and price is becoming very much a factor which we intentionally came into the category with the idea of setting ourselves apart as not being a commodity product and, of course, we have a specific customer avatar. That is okay with that. But the problem is we are reaching a point where it seems that Amazon is not okay with that. Like, it's been very difficult for us in terms of ranking and keeping our costs down in terms of advertising, things like that we are. Our percentage of sales that's coming from ad cost is climbing, and what you're saying there suggests to me that it makes a lot of sense that the A9 algorithm is now taking, you know, it's looking at price as a significant factor, as there's a lot of people in that category that really are shopping that way, and so therefore, our high price point, you know, may continue to be problematic. It may be something that's difficult to overcome, with all of those other factors that we're, you know, trying to work on.

Speaker 2: 54:57

Yeah, yes, I know. So price is one of those things that I thought was going to have a much bigger weight with A9. And in a, in most categories, price is like three to 6% weight, okay, out of the weight. In a commodity niche it might be 10 or 11%, right, it's not. It's not like a top three kind of thing, right. But if you only have a 1% disadvantage across all of the factors combined to most of your competitors and all you had to do was increase any one of these factors by 2% and you could leapfrog ahead of all of them, price may be that one thing that you manipulate and you get better at and you're able to leapfrog. But maybe price isn't, you know, maybe you just like well, I don't want to reduce my price, that kills my profitability. Let me focus in on oh, here's this other thing. You know whether or not I've got this particular badge or I have. You know prime, you know prime eligible, you know FBA or something like that. Or in other words, there's 20 other factors. Well, if I can bump any one of these up by 2% now, I'm 1% ahead of my next 30 competitors. I've got to leapfrog them. So it doesn't have to be on price, we assume as we observe the outside and we look at this and say like, well, look, I mean, everybody seems to be competing on price. That must be how they're winning, because they're on price. But in order to do the analysis kind of the deep data analysis that we're doing in a specific product niche you would literally need a team of 30 humans every single month look in all your competition every single week in order to accomplish what we're able to accomplish through the big data analysis. That's what technology is giving us, that's what machine learning and AI is giving us here. We haven't even incorporated anything as far as, like, the language models yet. That's our next thing. That's another phase. But at the same time, is it you don't have to? It's the same kind of thing of like you know what I want? This really high competitive two word term. But you know what? Let me go ahead and get these 10 to 20 long tail. You know four or five word terms. Let me win those and from a sales volume I'll be up. You know, probably similar to that one guy that's got this one competitive term that he's that it's expensive. In other words, he focused on this one, you focused on these other 10 and you solve the same problem. Now rankings take a point or sales velocity standpoint, and so it doesn't have to necessarily be. Your observation may be that, hey, the price is being driven down. There may be plenty of other factors that you can tweak and leap frog so that they're playing the price game, but you're not right.

Speaker 1: 57:56

So I think this maybe it dovetails well into one of the topics that I've got on here that I think a lot of brands would be interested in, which is, if you've been around for a while as a brand and you've launched products, you've definitely run into a situation where a launch did not go the way that you wanted to and you end up with a product that basically either struggles or, quite frankly, fails. So if you have one of those products, one of the things that you have in your notes is to reviving dead products. So what insights can you give us for the brands that are listening and like, hey, I launched this product and I feel like it's a dead product. What can I do in order to revive that product?

Speaker 2: 58:34

Yeah, I mean as far as from a prediction standpoint, there's always going to be a margin of error when it comes to any kind of data analysis and prediction, so it's not like we've got, you know. In other words, there's always going to be a margin of error. When we have enough data for an established product that sells well already and we're looking how to exploit that, go even further and lift it, lift the sales and the organic rank even higher, you know our accuracy might be 85, 90% correct, right, as far as, hey, we predict this 85, 90% of the time we're actually going to be able to hit that, hit that mark. When we don't have that, in situations where the product hasn't been selling, it doesn't have much in the way of sales velocity and sessions and these kinds of things, it's kind of been a dead product or a failed to launch product. Similar is if you've never launched the product in the first place and you're just looking at a product and you're just saying like I wonder if I should get in there, I wonder if that niche has any weaknesses for me to go after that I can exploit and I can win in those areas. In other words, I need to be able to pick my battle rather than going head to head with these 800 pound gorillas that are established. I'm going to essentially steal market share from 50 different competitors in this space because they're all weak in different places. I'm going to exploit every single weakness that's in that niche and that's where I'm going to win. I don't need to have a top five organic ranking on these highly competitive terms. I can look for everything that is a hole, a chink in the arm or a hole in the competition, and I can exploit that through SEO, through advertising, and I can properly launch, I could relaunch or I could grow my existing sales. Yes, all three of those are possible if you have enough information about what your product niche and your competitive set are doing or not doing correctly. The second part of this is being aware of how that changes from week to week, because you may have competitors that go out there. You launch a product, you relaunch a dead product, you're starting to grow visibility and sales, you're starting to get seen. Now, all of a sudden, hey, how come something slowed down? How come my sales rank dropped from 15,000 down to 30,000? It's probably because of what your competition did, not necessarily because of what you did and you've reached a tipping point where you always had the competitive advantage this whole time and enough of your competitors logged in and started using Chad TBT in order to improve their conversion rate of their bullet points. And now, all of a sudden, they've got a half a percent advantage on you and that creates a massive drop, because what I like to call competitive shelves is they tend to bunch together, whether it's bids on advertising or it is their strength in any one of these factors that go into A9 search ranking is it may only be a 1% difference between you being below them or you being above them, but there might be 20 competitors in between. That is very fragile. So that's kind of where we run into. It's like okay, do I have enough gap between me and my competitors? The thing that we figured out yesterday is we had the ability to see also is okay, I am super strong in this one factor. In fact, I am 30% better than everybody else. I don't need to be that strong. I can dilute that a little bit or I can completely. I can be more experimental in other factors adjust my price up, whatever, because I've got some room to play before I fall off that cliff and jump down, you know, fall down to a lower level, but if I'm just slightly above, that says like, okay, you need to work on building up your strength or foundation because you don't have enough room to play. So, whether that is knowing if you're launching a product, you know if you're launching, if you haven't launched into a niche and you want to know about that niche, the ability is there to go in into, you know, hyperanalyze an entire product niche. If you have a product that doesn't have any sales or very weak sales history, very weak session history, where you're trying to revive that product and you're looking like, okay, how do I position this product among my competitive set to exploit their weaknesses so that it fills in gaps? I don't want to change my hero product or my sidekick product, but I do want to have this little minion over here, this minion product over here. I want them to exploit these individual gaps and starts paying for itself and starts selling through the imagery. Because I definitely don't want to get that bill from FBA, because I've had inventory in there too long. There seems to be really high ones in there.

Speaker 3: 1:03:44

You know that's an interesting concept I don't know if either you, john, or Matt, have heard that before. I haven't in terms of that idea of these kind of you know search shelves, you know where you might have a bunch up of competitors that you could easily leapfrog you know over 10 or 20 competitors with one minor change. That's actually something I've never heard. It's an interesting concept to me, but it makes sense that that could be true. So I think that's it's a different way to look at things, recognizing that there could be a shelf you know, like so where maybe you're, you're sitting at, you know position 25 and you think, you know you're looking at that and going man the difference between 25 and five, like that's a massive shift, when in reality maybe it's not a massive shift, maybe it's a very minor shift that that moves you. You know that far.

Speaker 4: 1:04:34

I think the reason why we haven't heard of that is because there hasn't been the technology to be able to sift through all of the data. That would have to get you to that point until now.

Speaker 2: 1:04:44

Yeah, Some of these have been theories for mine for years. I've built things like Chrome extensions in order to try to test them for myself and experiment and everything, but even then it was very, you know, too too small of a sample to be significant, statistically significant. And so when you start getting into, you know massive data calling and analysis and looking for patterns and looking at things a hundred different, the same data, a hundred different ways you start finding things that are just not feasible for humans. Like I said, you would literally need a team of 30 people in order to do the same kind of analysis. There's nobody who's going to hire 30 people just to sit there and crank through a single product, niche analysis, you know, unless you're some major brand, and then probably not even then. So that's kind of where technology and speed and the ability to crunch massive data the computing power is now available in order to look at this. Yes, there's definitely a cost to it. I think probably one of the things that we have had to craft over the past year and a half is refining our scoring algorithms internally in order to know, in order to interpret that data correctly so that it becomes accurate. That is definitely our proprietary edge is not just the data collection, it's how do you actually interpret that and how do you continue to observe that. But then to also go through and see, the nice thing about a lot of this data now is it's able to prove a lot of the theories that I got kind of not mocked. But I would say, like you know, dismissed in the past, you know, among my peers is like yeah, I don't know if I buy that and like whatever it's like, prove it. It's like I can't prove it because I don't have the data behind it. And now some of these things that I'm like it's like I knew that that's the way that worked. You know, I can pat myself on the back quietly in some dark room while I'm working on the next generation code of something you know back when it used to matter, it would have, you know, would have helped. But now it's kind of like, yeah, okay, I got it, yeah, and I wonder if it's moving.

Speaker 1: 1:06:54

The overt version of this shelf concept is that's, you know, visible to everybody is, I think that I think about or comes to my mind is price. So if you look at price, at a category and the products that are there in the top 50 per, say, you're going to see 80% of those products. They're going to be, you know, clustered very closely together on price and then you're going to have a few outliers.

Speaker 2: 1:07:19

Yeah, now that price actually. So if you look at things like far as like discounts, like like temporary discounts, lightning deals, coupons, these kinds of things that adjust price, you can increase your sales velocity. One of the factors, separate from simply is like how many units are you selling per day? But what have you done for me recent, what have you done for me lately? Kind of sales velocity and in other words, there is, there's an observation of like very recent spikes in sales velocity contribute, but oftentimes is a top 10, I'm going to just call it a top 10 factor is when you do these promotions. That's why you get some sellers who will go in and it's like like I'm doing, I'm turning my coupons off, you know every month, you know I'm turning them all, I'm cycling them every single month. I'm doing a lightning deal every other week. They've observed that the organic ranking increases as a result of spending a little bit on that kind of promotion and cycling back and forth, because it actually is one of the weighted factors. But it's a hit and miss, much like a, much like a rebate giveaway or a being price sense, you know price competitive or it's going to vary from one product to each, to another. That's one of the reasons why the results are often inconsistent is because you may be juicing something that doesn't have that much of an impact in that particular subcategory, that browse node or your competitors are so strong that you didn't juice it enough in order to overcome that shelf.

Speaker 1: 1:09:07

So we've talked a lot about data, talked about the shelf for brands that are listening out there. What is, maybe, you know, one action item that you would encourage them to look at that they could take or should take right away and remove their brand forward.

Speaker 2: 1:09:22

based on our conversation today, they should definitely look at things as far as like where they're first of all. For anybody that has is still hanging onto the notion is that the reason that I'm advertising is in order to get those advertised sales, with a focus on break even, for instance is if your outcome for an advertising standpoint which is probably one of the bigger expenses if your focus is just to get the gross number of sales of your products, then you're in a weak position relative to your competition. If you are going after an outcome where that is organic ranking or proving that you have a much higher conversion rate on a specific search term, those should be where your focus is is from an experimental standpoint. Because what I would do if I, on the cheap, if I have a product that's getting at least 800 sessions per month and I can use Amazon experiments, I would look at my advertising and I would say which search terms do I have the highest conversion rate on, and then I would start using Amazon experiments for A to A, b split tests, maybe my title or my bullet points. It's not already in the title, it's not already in the bullet points as far as that search term that has the highest high conversion rate in your ads. That's an indicator to say, like you know what. I'm going to test this in my title in and split test it in my bullet points to see can I then move organic rank needle further. There's other reports that are available, depending on if you're seller central or vendor central or marketing. You know, cloud that will allow you to see individual search terms that are based off a search only. Not all your sales, but, like search query performance, is search only. Search only is only about 40 to 60% of your total sales and so just be aware of what that actually is contributing. Just say like, hey, this is, you know, the one report that's going to tell me the whole picture. It doesn't, but it is giving you some clues. Again, that's a secondary thing is your search query performance, as well as your advertising, to see which individual search terms have the highest conversion rate and start integrating those across more of your products that maybe are in a weaker position, that maybe are not optimized from an SEO listing standpoint on those specific search terms. So it seems like a pretty basic check to do, but I can guarantee that 80% of brands like going like oh, I didn't actually do that, I'm advertising and I'm enjoying the fact that I'm converting on the search term, but I didn't actually carry any further into my product listing to try to get organically ranked on those search terms also.

Speaker 1: 1:12:33

Yeah, and I think the hard thing is everybody does it once and it's just making that part of your regular rhythm to make sure that you're checking out they only pick PPC, for instance, and say well, I've got a ranking campaign where this is the only search term you know that I'm going after.

Speaker 2: 1:12:51

But it's not working Well because you only focus on one of 20 factors. Carry it over to other factors, like your title, your bullet points.

Speaker 1: 1:13:03

Yeah. So, brian, for folks that are interested in learning more about what you're doing over a deep M, ai and big data, where's a good place for them to see kind of what you're working on or maybe to connect with you?

Speaker 2: 1:13:18

Yeah, I mean from a product standpoint. Certainly our website, deepMai the M stands for Marketplace is in the Amazon Marketplace, so deepMai is our site. You can certainly contact us to be there. I spend most of my time on LinkedIn, so LinkedIn is probably where you can follow me. I think I'm up there as, like Brian R Johnson, PPC still, even though my focus has gone away from PPC. It's a factor, you know, and it works. It works as one factor of 20, you know. So it's a necessary evil as long as there's an outcome to the use of it. So focus that advertising to accomplish your goal, not simply just to increase sales.

Speaker 1: 1:14:09

Okay, yeah, and I think that as Amazon gets more competitive, that's going to become even more and more important, along with the work that you're doing with big data. So, brian, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it, and I think you left the Thanks for having me on. I'm listening to listeners with a lot to think about and a couple of great action items for them to work on. Thanks, brian. Awesome. Thanks guys.