032: Ritu Java's Masterclass on Mastering Amazon PPC and Transforming Data Analysis

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Welcome everyone to the Brand Fortress HQ podcast.

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I'm your host, jon Stojan.

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Today I have my co-host, matt Atkins, and we're excited to have Ritu Jaba, the CEO of PPC Ninja, as our guest today.

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Ritu started e-commerce, actually as an Etsy seller, over a decade ago, and now serves as the CEO of PPC Ninja, a leading software tool and service provider for six to eight figure brands in the Amazon PPC space.

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She's very passionate about applying data analytics to get the best ROI on PPC.

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She shared her knowledge on hundreds of podcasts like ours webinars, blogs, conferences, including the prestigious Prosper Show, global Sources Summit, powwow and the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, where she was voted the best speaker.

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Ritu, welcome.

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So much to the podcast.

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Thank you so much John and so much Matt.

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It's been great knowing you guys over the years and it's really awesome that you guys started this amazing podcast and I'm excited to be on it.

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Thank you.

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Well, let's start with folks that maybe aren't familiar with you.

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A little bit of your background and how did you get into e-commerce, even for the Etsy days over a decade ago?

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Yeah, so I'm an engineer by background and I was working for IT companies.

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I used to live in Japan at the time 17 years in Japan and then I discovered Etsy and I was selling my products on there.

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This was a jewelry brand and I quickly realized that it's not enough just to set up a store and that people will come and buy.

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You've got to do a whole lot of other things like marketing and Facebook advertising.

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I had to start my own YouTube channel to support my tribe.

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I had to start my own YouTube channel to support my you know kind of my tribe.

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I had to create a tribe.

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I had to understand that you need a tribe first in order to sell them stuff and things like that.

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And then that actually led me to kind of go back to school.

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So I went back to school in the US and I did a course in data science because I'm really passionate about data, because I wanted to understand how numbers can help to kind of make the most of, you know at the time, my e-commerce brand.

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But then I gave that up and I was totally excited when I discovered Amazon PPC and I was like, oh my goodness, this thing converts so much better than Facebook or anything else, and then I just didn't have.

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I didn't look back.

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You know, I was just totally into Amazon PPC.

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Fast forward to today.

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I live in Canada.

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I'm a Canadian citizen now, I've been here for seven years, I live in Vancouver, beautiful, and I am the CEO of PPC Ninja.

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We're a software and services company, as you mentioned, so we handle, as an agency, we handle our clients' PPC accounts.

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So that's my backstory.

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Okay, yeah, and I'll put a little plug in there for PPC Ninja.

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So we've used this at our agency and tested a lot of different solutions out there and what you guys do at PPC Ninja.

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You guys do a fantastic job, and especially on the analytics front and providing some pretty easy integration into Google Looker, which I think is really valuable as far as insights that you can't necessarily get from the Amazon dashboard even to this day.

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So I've definitely experienced that and seen how you've built that into your tools.

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So I guess the first question I have from the notes I have is one of these ideas of and I feel like a lot of sellers, especially if they have some traction, are familiar with this idea of niching down.

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But you talk about niching down to the right degree.

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When we start looking at that, doing that data analysis, how do you think about niching down?

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I think most sellers that have that traction are familiar with.

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Okay, I know to look for how much search volume there is across what I think most sellers that have that traction are familiar with.

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Okay, I know to look for how much search volume there is across what I think are going to be my main keywords.

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Where is in your mind.

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How do you think about that sweet spot when you look at search volume?

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Yeah, yeah, great.

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So first of all, thank you so much for mentioning ppc ninja.

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I did not realize that you had used ppc ninja, so this is really cool.

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I'm excited.

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A quick plug I'm happy to say that I introduced john to ppc ninja three years ago and then and then what he did was he created all the sops that we used on our team later on.

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So there's a plug back at you oh, oh, my goodness.

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This is, oh, my goodness, I'm discovering new stuff on this podcast Amazing.

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Thank you so much for saying that, both of you so yeah, so let's talk about niching down to the right degree, right?

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So when you know, we do a lot of PPC audits, right, and we see people struggling with not being able to kind of succeed on Amazon, despite doing all the right things, you know, like they've done their keyword research, they've used all the great tools out there to do their keyword research.

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They put up an amazing listing there's so many service providers these days, you know, they can give you like beautiful listings in no time, and you know.

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Then they start selling and they obviously notice that there's like hundreds of other products just like theirs, you know.

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And so how do you stand out?

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So then they want to differentiate, they want to, you know, create something that is of value that is not available with some, someone else, and it becomes like this kind of very hard game of trying to stand out in a very crowded market.

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That's one extreme, right.

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Then there's the other extreme, where people are coming up with new ideas, like very super innovative ideas for products that nobody knows about, even Something that they would want to use themselves and they created, like with a Kickstarter mindset or something, and that product unfortunately needs to be sold to an audience that doesn't know about it.

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So the problem with amazon is or I mean, I'm stating it as a problem, but really what it is is that unless you have search volume on amazon, your unique product is not going to be discoverable, right?

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So nobody wants to know that you've made, let's say, I don't know something like a mushroom gummy or something.

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If nobody even understands that, that's a concept, right, it has to be a concept that people are seeded with prior to them looking for it on Amazon.

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So, when it comes down to kind of finding the best niche for a product that they should be selling on Amazon, search volume is definitely one important one.

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The other one is trying to not educate the market too much, like you shouldn't have to teach the market what your product is first in order for them to be interested in it, because that's a lot of selling, right, and Amazon unfortunately isn't that great with upper funnel brand building, because you have to spend a ton of money in order to get a little bit of traction and then you know very quickly you'll have copycats, right?

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So your investment may not really help you.

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It might help everybody else, right?

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So it's just the nature of the game, and so, knowing how far down to niche and not coming up with totally unique products that nobody knows about, that's probably what I would say to that question.

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Okay, well, I guess you know, from a data standpoint, is that matter?

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Do you look at it?

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You know pretty much from a mathematical formula of saying, okay, well, if I know I've got, you know, let's just say, a thousand searches a month, my click-through rate should be, you know, if we're looking at sponsored product ads, a minimum of you know, you know, 0.1 to 0.2%, and of that my conversion rate assuming that I'm priced similar to the category and I've got strong listings should be, let's call it, 10% is just kind of a ballpark number.

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Now, obviously that's going to be different depending on category, but is it just a matter of doing that mathematical formula and saying, okay, based on these numbers, I know I should expect to sell five units, 10 units a day, or whatever that happens to be based on that search volume?

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Yeah, yeah, and I think there's one more piece to it.

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So definitely the mathematical formula of trying to figure out how many units you can potentially sell in a day in order to get to a certain point.

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The other aspect is having the margin to support ads.

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A lot of people forget that there's ads that need to be run in order to get any kind of momentum.

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On Amazon, like when you start off on Amazon, you're starting at the very bottom of this very large pile of products.

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Everybody else is ahead of you at that point.

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There's no one behind you, there's everybody ahead of you.

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So you've got to kind of push through that crowd and get to the top.

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And what do you need for that?

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You need so much like in terms of like, external traffic or PPC.

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Your listing by itself is not going to sell itself, right.

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You've got to create some momentum, you've got to generate that yourself.

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So, knowing that there's going to be a spend involved, especially in the beginning, the first couple of months, two or three months you do need to be prepared to kind of spend aggressively on PPC.

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But then also, don't get caught up in the trap of ranking, and I think I would love to talk about the topic of ranking, because I know that people think that as long as they can rank for a few keywords, they'll be good, they'll be fine, yeah.

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So let's talk about ranking in a bit, but I just want to say that you need to have the margin.

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So either, you know, go with products that have the margin built into it, so anything, let's say, above a hundred dollars or so, will, you know, give you margin that can be used for PPC.

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Or the other way is to have products that have a high average order value, meaning it could be a bundle or something, or it could be a product that has a high lifetime value, because then your initial investment in PPC can keep paying off over time, because those same people can be remarketed to and there's less cost involved in remarketing than there is in first-time customer acquisition.

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So you want to kind of engineer your product journey in the right way, knowing that Amazon is so competitive and that you essentially don't have a price advantage over your Chinese counterparts.

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They have the factories, they have the price, they have the shipping advantages that you don't, right, so making sure that you're prepared for that is super important.

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Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that come to my mind and I'm curious what you see in the marketplace.

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I mean, the first is that so we were having this discussion about launching and one of the things we were talking with Bradley Sutton about it.

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He was talking about some of the experiments that he was running and I found it really interesting that, you know, he was launching a couple of new products and just his approach to it was still, in addition to the PPC, it was, you know, discounting those products pretty significantly out of the gate in order to gain that momentum.

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And it wasn't, you know, in that launch phase, it wasn't even really about having margins, you know, or breaking even, it was really just about momentum having margins, you know, or breaking even, it was really just about momentum.

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And then, as you get sales, as you get reviews, then looking at increasing that price to get to where you know your that margin that you think you can sustain.

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So I'm curious, you know, I feel like what I'm seeing anyway is that the for new products, the expectations are changing, where you used to be able to launch and expect to be profitable out of the gate, and now I feel like that is more and more rare.

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How does that compare to what you're seeing?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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It's very, very hard to hit a home run right off the bat, like getting a new product in the market and seeing that it's, like you know, scaling to number one bestseller rank.

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That's becoming harder and harder and you know, some of the tricks that people used to, or tactics that people used to use in the past are no longer permissible, right, and so you have fewer ways of getting that momentum unless you really have a product that's suitable for virality, and then you can use channels like TikTok and so on to kind of drive external traffic to your listing and that way get that momentum.

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There's another way that I know a few of my clients are using, and that's building a tribe.

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So they're building a tribe, creating like a community of people who are interested in products around a certain theme or a tribe.

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So they're building a tribe, creating like a community of people who are interested in products around a certain theme or a topic, and then they are able to kind of use those lists or those email lists and that community to sell those you know kind of any new launches they do.

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They can sell those products to those groups of people that are dedicated to a topic or a theme.

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So that's another way of kind of sending traffic.

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I like the discount idea that Bradley has outlined, because you know anything that has like a green badge or red badge or anything that tells people that, hey, this is, you're getting a good deal here.

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And it's funny that Amazon has, over the time, it's actually trained people to just look for deals.

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We go to Amazon for a good deal, right?

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I mean, that's just how we've been trained.

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I do it Like I look for deals all the time.

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So when there are two similar products that don't have too much differentiation, I'm going to go with the cheapest, like why shouldn't I Like?

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Why would I spend the time to go read their listing and try to find out?

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How is this different from the other thing that I just saw, which was, you know, $3 or even a dollar cheaper?

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You know that's how we've.

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You know we've got to understand that Amazon, the platform, is all about deals and so kind of building in that discounting mindset, having an always on coupon mindset.

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That's what we tell our clients.

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You should always have a coupon, like we.

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We recommend that you kind of refresh your coupons every quarter so that you don't forget.

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We tell them, hey, align your coupon end date with the end of the quarter so that you don't forget to refresh them.

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And so that way you just keep going.

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You know, just keep refreshing your coupons, because people want to see that badge and they want a good deal.

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Yeah, so there's a couple of things that I think are important that I want to highlight there that you said.

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The first is that if you have a tribe off of Amazon, and so one of the things that we really talk about quite a bit and really recommend for brands especially in order to fortify their brands, to continue to grow and all those types of things going forward is to build that tribe and build that, you know, ideally an email list, but whether it be social media or somewhere else, an email list is great because you know you own that list, you can take it anywhere and and you can use it for multiple product launches.

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And you know, mike, one of our other co-founders, has talked on previous episodes on how he uses his list for everything from product discovery to product research with his customers, to getting them ready for launch and then actually launching in order to get that momentum.

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And it is one of those trade-offs of like, hey, if you don't have that tribe, then the only I shouldn't say the only, but the other option that you have really comes down to discounting your price until you get that right price point in order to get some initial traction.

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Right.

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I really love that.

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The most important things for you, ritu, to talk about when you sent over your questionnaire was picking a niche and building a brand, and that's really where we focus as Brand Fortress HQ.

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One of the skills that John brings to the table is how to create that tribe at the very beginning and do Facebook ads targeting to people that are interested in things, not just looking for freebie seekers or people that are looking for a deal, but part of your people.

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Are you going to be in your tribe, growing a little bit of an audience pre-launch, then using that as kind of for the launch?

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And then John brought up how Mike is really really good at post-purchase things and QR codes to get people on a list, giving a giveaway, doing the only one in his category to offer a lifetime warranty.

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But all of those things are important, especially now.

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I mean, yes, you know 2015,.

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You might've been able to throw up a garlic press and do very well, but now you know and the game has changed so much.

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So in building that audience, building that tribe is so important and it's really the kind of genesis of what we talk about at Brand Fortress and I have two guys that are really good at post-purchase things and another guy that's really good at pre-purchase things and it's all about building a tribe and I love that.

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That's really an important thing for you and you're a PPC expert.

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But those are the things that you see as necessary for success on Amazon and I love that expert.

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But those are the things that you see as necessary for success on Amazon, and I love that, right, yeah, and just to add, let's say you don't have what it takes to build a tribe.

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I mean, ideally you should be thinking in that direction, along those lines.

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But let's say you don't have access to that.

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You can still do something similar by borrowing other people's tribes through influencers, because they have already kind of built their audience right, and so then you're paying for that as a service.

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It's almost like tribe as a service, and you're locking into what they're able to sell and being able to find hundreds of influencers.

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The strategy that people are using with influencers these days is to tap into hundreds of them, not just like one or two.

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You know it's like go after a hundred, see how you know they can promote your products and, you know, find the ones that are doing extremely well, and then double down with ads but put ads behind them.

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So that's another way, in case you don't have the time, to kind of build your your own tribe uh, own tribe, just as an additional note there.

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Yeah, and that's a great one too, because especially when you're launching a product, that can be such an advantage.

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If you've got some influencers and they don't have to have a massive audience, but if they're right in your target market and you've got a product that is truly differentiated from the other competitors on Amazon, that can be a great way to drive some traffic and to build long-term relationships without having to do dramatic discounts.

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I do want to make sure that we double click on one of the things you mentioned at the tactical level, because I think it's so important for folks to understand, when you're talking about the coupons, I think, what a lot of sellers miss in there and the advantage of them over other types of discounts is that generally only about 20% to 40% of those coupons ever get redeemed.

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So that means that if you're offering a $10 coupon on your product, you're really only losing about $3 worth of margin out of that.

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So when you're doing that math, that can be a huge advantage.

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When you start looking at the increase that you get in click-through rate and conversion rates, you can be far, far ahead by offering a bigger discount than you can then you think are a bigger coupon than you think, and for folks that maybe haven't seen it yet, I think it's been out for about a month now.

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But Amazon has really revamped how you can target with coupons so you can make that process even more effective.

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You know, going after people that fall into that subscribe and save and all those other different categories.

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So I just want to say that that is such a powerful strategy that I want to make sure that you know listeners really think about how they can apply that to their brand, because coupons kind of sound kind of old-fashioned but there is a lot of power in coupons on Amazon as a strategy.

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I love that, especially with tentpole events like Prime Day etc.

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People are only going to Amazon for deals Like especially those days.

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If you're not running like a Prime exclusive deal or a pretty deep discount, it's not going to work.

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Like, you should probably stay out of Prime Day if you're not interested in discounting.

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So what we do with our customers is that if they say, hey, I don't have the margin on this product, I'm not interested in discounting product, I'm not interested in discounting, well then we actually turn their budgets off during Prime Day so that they don't get kind of swamped with clicks and no sales.

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And the clicks during those days are very expensive.

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So the CPCs go up and so we protect them by just not running any ads at all for products that they're not willing to discount.

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So I think that's another thing to remember that discounting is part of the process on Amazon.

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It's not something that's optional.

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It's something that you should consider as part of your expense in order to be chosen over anyone else, and there's a reason for the selection.

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If you are selected more often than others, in other words, conversion rate.

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If your conversion rate is better, then everything works out better, right?

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Even PPC starts to make more sense.

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It's cheaper.

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You win your clicks much cheaper if you have a high conversion rate, and so anything you can do to keep your conversion rates high will help you in the long run as well.

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Yeah, and so anything you can do to keep your conversion rates high will help you in the long run as well.

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Yeah, and I think the other thing so when I think about that too and in talking with brands, is just remembering that every product has a job.

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So not every one of your products is going to be a hero product and a bestseller.

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You're going to have some products that are going to be sidekick products that maybe you don't sell.

00:20:55.766 --> 00:20:57.628
You know as many units.

00:20:57.628 --> 00:21:00.855
You know maybe only sell 10% as many units as you do your hero product.

00:21:00.855 --> 00:21:08.663
But if your margins are much, much better on that product, then that can be a great contribution to your bottom line at the end of the day.

00:21:08.663 --> 00:21:21.531
And, you know, really compliment each other rather than trying to, you know, push every product as hard as you possibly can, because not every product is really a good fit in order to be a hero product.

00:21:22.862 --> 00:21:25.074
Right, yeah, I totally agree with that, yeah.

00:21:25.961 --> 00:21:29.852
How important do you see in terms of building a brand and expanding it?

00:21:29.852 --> 00:21:36.005
How important is it for you and your experience to be launching products, to be expanding product line?

00:21:36.005 --> 00:21:38.381
How important is success on Amazon?

00:21:40.324 --> 00:21:47.185
Yeah, I think what happens with you know products is that they all have a shelf life, whether you like it or not.

00:21:47.185 --> 00:21:49.115
You know there's going to be new things coming.

00:21:49.115 --> 00:21:53.813
People are going to be interested in you know, anything that's new, novelty.

00:21:53.813 --> 00:22:06.760
You will need to kind of keep evolving and if you're just static and if you just don't invest in product development or, you know, building your brand and growing from there, you'll start to slow down, naturally, right, that's just the nature of the game.

00:22:06.760 --> 00:22:19.653
So, you know, looking for a niche where you can actually grow as a cohesive, you know set of products, not just, okay, I'm selling, you know I'm selling pens and then I'm also selling kitchen items.

00:22:19.753 --> 00:22:38.782
And you know, like, a brand that's not cohesive is not going to last you very long because you want to use those assets across all of them, like the sponsored brand, sponsored brand ads leading to storefront right, that's a really cool way of sending people to your, to your assets so that they can discover all the different product lines you have.

00:22:38.782 --> 00:22:40.607
But then it has to be cohesive.

00:22:40.607 --> 00:22:42.480
Like if you're choosing kitchen, stay with kitchen.

00:22:42.480 --> 00:22:44.688
If you're choosing stationery, stay with stationery.

00:22:44.688 --> 00:22:47.964
Don't kind of mix and match, but keep evolving.

00:22:47.964 --> 00:22:54.564
You will need to keep evolving in order to also kind of hedge your bets, because some products will die.

00:22:54.564 --> 00:22:59.663
You won't be able to survive, no matter what you do, even if you've got great ranking.

00:22:59.663 --> 00:23:01.907
Some products just won't survive.

00:23:01.907 --> 00:23:12.884
I think nine out of 10 products die a natural death, and so in order to keep growing, you have to keep adding new products and be prepared for that sort of investment over time.

00:23:14.008 --> 00:23:20.248
Well, and I think that comes back to the strategic conversation we were having before, which about ad costs and margins.

00:23:20.248 --> 00:23:22.092
So we talked quite a bit about the launch process.

00:23:22.092 --> 00:23:38.382
How do you think or what recommendations would you have, for you know, brands, as these products, go through that life cycle, and how do they, how should they kind of do that calculation for how much they should put into, how much ad costs should take up with margin?

00:23:40.465 --> 00:23:41.669
Yeah, so you know.

00:23:41.669 --> 00:23:45.782
First of all, you know when you launch a product you're going to have very few reviews.

00:23:45.782 --> 00:23:50.192
You're going to have very little kind of momentum.

00:23:50.192 --> 00:23:51.522
It's going to be slow.

00:23:51.522 --> 00:24:03.839
So in the beginning you have to do any everything that you can do in order to get the conversion rate up and you will be investing in PPC and other channels in order to get that traffic going.

00:24:03.839 --> 00:24:05.586
And the traffic needs to convert as well.

00:24:05.586 --> 00:24:25.497
So first two or three months typically we see like over 100% ACOS easily and then, if you're translating that into like margins, be prepared for break-even because 80% to 90% of your sales are going to come from PPC in the beginning.

00:24:25.497 --> 00:24:27.508
So your ACoS is going to be like your tacos.

00:24:27.508 --> 00:24:28.839
It's not going to be very different.

00:24:28.839 --> 00:24:32.170
You're just pushing and you're still building up your keyword ranks.

00:24:32.170 --> 00:24:37.545
So that would be the first three months and then after that you can start to.

00:24:37.545 --> 00:24:48.368
You know, slow down on ads, start to become more profitable, set your target a cost to be a little bit more profitable, but don't be in a rush because you still need to measure where you stand.

00:24:48.368 --> 00:24:59.846
You know in the market is the market also evolving as fast as you know you're like you might be increasing in your, in your ranks, but then the market is also catching up and there's more players.

00:25:00.268 --> 00:25:01.049
Usually happens, right?

00:25:01.049 --> 00:25:05.971
You, you, you launch a new product and then suddenly there's 10 or 20 copycats everywhere, right?

00:25:05.971 --> 00:25:14.005
So you've got to measure all those things and factor in the possibility of it being a dud, you know, at the end of three months or four months, right?

00:25:14.005 --> 00:25:19.806
So then the other thing too is like knowing your supply chain, your lead times, et cetera.

00:25:19.806 --> 00:25:25.740
So if you do have a success, do you have the ability to kind of replenish stock quickly?

00:25:25.740 --> 00:25:32.066
And if that's not thought through in the beginning, again, you could end up in a failure because you might go out of stock.

00:25:32.066 --> 00:25:40.263
And then, once you're out of stock, that's almost like I don't know, in Windows terms, the blue screen of death, like coming back from.

00:25:40.305 --> 00:25:41.669
That is like how do I do this?

00:25:41.819 --> 00:25:45.060
You know coming back from out of stock is extremely hard, right?

00:25:45.060 --> 00:25:51.526
So you know there's so many things, right, you have to get absolutely right in order to succeed on Amazon.

00:25:51.526 --> 00:26:08.420
Those things you know, factoring in potentially air shipment if you need to kind of cover the, you know, a small window of time so that you don't run out of stock, or tweaking your ads so that you don't run out of stock, because that's really something you should never have to deal with.

00:26:08.420 --> 00:26:12.815
So I guess write down all of those and try to figure out what it.

00:26:12.815 --> 00:26:14.560
You know what that amount is.

00:26:14.560 --> 00:26:17.349
I don't think there's an easy way to calculate it.

00:26:17.349 --> 00:26:22.136
It's a little bit of it will be a hunch or a little bit of it would be math based.

00:26:22.136 --> 00:26:26.328
But just know that there's going to be expenses that you haven't imagined.

00:26:26.328 --> 00:26:27.820
You know that they might be coming.

00:26:28.122 --> 00:26:37.809
Yeah, yeah, and and generally, you know, whatever you think you you need for an ad budget, and and and double it, so that way you can be happily surprised.

00:26:39.040 --> 00:26:41.963
You don't need it, just double it.

00:26:41.963 --> 00:26:43.809
Yeah, absolutely yeah.

00:26:44.779 --> 00:26:45.342
One other question.

00:26:45.342 --> 00:26:47.086
So you talked, I mean, conversion rates.

00:26:47.086 --> 00:26:55.222
I feel like this is one of those things that has been the drum has been beat on that for the last couple of years of conversion rates, which makes a lot of sense.

00:26:55.222 --> 00:27:04.652
But I've also seen that where you know people would be like, well, my product has, you know, three times the average conversion rate of you know the category or something like that.

00:27:04.652 --> 00:27:10.321
But if you look at the amount of traffic that they have, you know they got you know 100 visits in the last 30 days.

00:27:10.321 --> 00:27:14.165
So it's basically you know only people that are looking specifically for their brand.

00:27:14.165 --> 00:27:22.957
So I guess, how do you think about balancing out conversion rate with you know kind of your CTR and traffic for a product?

00:27:24.520 --> 00:27:26.789
Yeah, so I think you know traffic.

00:27:26.789 --> 00:27:29.601
You can get traffic through a few different sources, right?

00:27:29.601 --> 00:27:29.881
One?

00:27:29.881 --> 00:27:31.684
The most obvious one, is keywords.

00:27:31.684 --> 00:27:35.580
You can bid on keywords and you can get traffic that way.

00:27:35.580 --> 00:27:45.989
The other way is to target competitors which a lot of people don't spend enough time or invest enough time to set up those campaigns for some reason, and that gets missed out.

00:27:45.989 --> 00:27:50.490
So you can always piggyback of the success of your competitors.

00:27:51.060 --> 00:28:06.190
Just to give you an example, there's a few different ad types that support product targeting and one of the ways and I'd like to give an example, so one of the ways you can actually target competitors that are more expensive than yours is to go after category targeting with refinements.

00:28:06.190 --> 00:28:13.970
I don't know if you've ever you guys must have tried it but I've seen so much success with category targeting and with the price refinements.

00:28:13.970 --> 00:28:23.799
Just to give you an example, there was a furniture brand that we kind of launched in the US and their products are like $500 plus right Now.

00:28:23.799 --> 00:28:37.825
If you try to do keyword ranking for a product that's $500 and the results that you see on page one are only like 40, 50, $60, $100, then how can keyword ranking help this brand?

00:28:37.825 --> 00:28:39.507
It's not going to help.

00:28:39.507 --> 00:28:51.592
Right, if you try to go push a $500 product for something that has a, you know, like a cheap equivalent that's less than a hundred dollars, the keyword ranking strategy starts to fail at that point.

00:28:51.592 --> 00:29:00.097
So we literally had, you know, we had to change our strategy and say, hey, no keywords for this one, like zero, no keywords.

00:29:00.586 --> 00:29:16.595
At launch, we only did category targeting and SPP, which is product targeting of extremely expensive products like others that were also in the same range $500 plus and then we could find our people, like we could get the traffic from there.

00:29:16.595 --> 00:29:25.527
Now, the advantage of doing product targeting is that you're basically getting qualified leads at a cheaper rate.

00:29:25.527 --> 00:29:29.965
You're targeting people who are already looking at a product that's very much like yours.

00:29:29.965 --> 00:29:37.250
So now it's just a matter of convincing them to, or considering having them consider you through a coupon or something you know.

00:29:37.250 --> 00:29:42.230
So you're showing up on their page, they compare the two and they say, oh, this one is cheaper.

00:29:42.230 --> 00:29:43.071
Let me go here.

00:29:43.071 --> 00:29:43.534
Yeah.

00:29:43.534 --> 00:30:00.920
So with that strategy of targeting someone that's slightly higher price than yours and then offering a coupon is a winning strategy and we use this successfully for, you know, a furniture brand that is now trending at, I think 15% ACOS and doing really really well.

00:30:01.362 --> 00:30:03.750
We did add keywords, but not in phase one.

00:30:03.750 --> 00:30:13.434
We added keywords once we had already discovered that they were naturally ranking for certain keywords through this process of product targeting, right.

00:30:13.434 --> 00:30:19.934
So it's a different approach, but knowing all the strategies out there can help to get traffic from different sources.

00:30:19.934 --> 00:30:25.531
You've got to use all the different ad types that are out there, but you want to use them smartly, Like.

00:30:25.531 --> 00:30:27.877
I'm going to give you another example sponsored brands.

00:30:27.877 --> 00:30:38.769
Right, Most people discard sponsored brands, as you know, expensive or have very high cost or don't do anything for me kind of thing.

00:30:39.289 --> 00:30:45.279
However, the way we use sponsored brands is primarily for bottom of funnel conversions.

00:30:45.279 --> 00:30:53.388
Amazon wants you to believe that sponsored brands are for brand building and for general awareness and things like that like upper funnel.

00:30:53.388 --> 00:30:59.667
We use it like we totally hacked it to use it like a bottom of funnel ad type.

00:30:59.667 --> 00:31:00.789
How do we do that?

00:31:00.789 --> 00:31:04.237
We try to match the long tail keyword.

00:31:04.237 --> 00:31:07.148
Or let's say, if it's a product target, then the product target.

00:31:07.148 --> 00:31:10.576
We match that to the headline itself.

00:31:10.576 --> 00:31:24.318
So let's say, if your product is stainless steel garlic press and the keyword is a stainless steel garlic press, then the title should not be something like make your kitchen life easy or something vague like that.

00:31:24.318 --> 00:31:25.267
You don't want that.

00:31:25.267 --> 00:31:27.451
You want stainless steel garlic.

00:31:27.451 --> 00:31:32.830
Press in the headline, in the copy itself, because it would do.

00:31:33.071 --> 00:31:36.181
You know, your, let me put it this way it's like magic.

00:31:36.181 --> 00:31:38.268
It's like reverse engineering magic.

00:31:38.268 --> 00:31:38.689
They type that word.

00:31:38.689 --> 00:31:41.136
The first thing they see is the same word right, and they're like, oh yeah, they, these guys are reading my mind.

00:31:41.136 --> 00:31:46.732
So they see is the same word right and they're like, oh yeah, these guys are reading my mind, so they will click through.

00:31:46.732 --> 00:31:52.173
Your click-through rate goes up when you're anticipating that word and you're showing it to them.

00:31:52.173 --> 00:31:54.125
Everything just matches right.

00:31:54.125 --> 00:32:04.989
So those are some of the tricks to improve your click-through rate to get traffic from every ad type that's out there getting placements where you're getting eyeballs, like sponsored displays.

00:32:04.989 --> 00:32:09.967
Another good one when it shows up right under the buy box or right under your bullet points.

00:32:09.967 --> 00:32:13.257
You get eyeballs there that you don't get with other ad types.

00:32:13.845 --> 00:32:14.086
Yeah.

00:32:14.086 --> 00:32:16.213
So a couple of questions there to get a little bit tactical.

00:32:16.213 --> 00:32:46.103
So I love that and I 100% agree with you, because that's the thing is that Amazon, as a customer, is a land of you know, a million choices, and so if there's something right at the top that says, okay, here's the exact keyword that I put in, and this product, you know, with the sponsor brand ad, is saying that they are the solution that I'm looking for, it makes it, you know, so much easier for me from a customer perspective to click on that ad and buy that product, for me, from a customer perspective, to click on that ad and buy that product.

00:32:46.103 --> 00:32:52.816
When you do that, are you generally driving them to the store or are you driving them directly to the listing with that sponsor brand ad?

00:32:52.836 --> 00:32:53.597
Yeah, that's a great question.

00:32:53.597 --> 00:32:57.730
So we're actually doing something again very, very specialized with stores.

00:32:57.730 --> 00:33:04.192
We're not driving them to the top, we're not sending them to the homepage where they're going to be like a kid in a candy shop.

00:33:04.192 --> 00:33:12.017
They're like, oh my goodness, they have this and this and this, so that might lead to them switching from ready to buy to window shopper.

00:33:12.017 --> 00:33:14.189
You don't want them to be window shoppers at that point.

00:33:14.568 --> 00:33:20.231
So we actually take all our sponsored brand traffic to special pages that are not even visible in the menu.

00:33:20.231 --> 00:33:26.689
They're sub, sub, sub, sub pages that are created just solely for the purpose of serving that ad.

00:33:26.689 --> 00:33:35.693
See, the thing is most people don't kind of design that entire funnel or flow of traffic from ad to landing page.

00:33:35.693 --> 00:33:44.636
They're just hoping that somehow, by putting some general keywords and some general headlines, that people will be somehow interested in your product and then also buy.

00:33:44.636 --> 00:33:46.861
That's hoping too much, right?

00:33:46.861 --> 00:33:54.246
So unless you engineer the entire process like step by step, you're not going to get the results that this kind of strategy is going to bring you.

00:33:54.246 --> 00:33:58.596
So what we do is we do single keyword campaigns wherever possible.

00:33:58.596 --> 00:34:10.054
Sometimes it's not possible and that's fine If we can do a single keyword campaign, with the word showing up in the copy, and then you take them to a page that has a video explaining the same thing.

00:34:10.494 --> 00:34:16.139
Whatever your word was, it's specialized, you know, answering the question that they came in with.

00:34:16.139 --> 00:34:19.902
There's a video there and then there's products that solve that problem.

00:34:19.902 --> 00:34:25.728
That solve that problem.

00:34:25.728 --> 00:34:26.630
Each product has the buy button on it.

00:34:26.630 --> 00:34:32.208
So you don't want to delay the process of purchase, you want to reduce friction to purchase and you want to choose the module that gives you the buy button.

00:34:32.208 --> 00:34:34.072
Most people forget to do that.

00:34:34.072 --> 00:34:37.264
They make their store pages really pretty.

00:34:37.264 --> 00:34:38.445
We don't want that.

00:34:38.445 --> 00:34:41.907
I mean, yes, you can make it pretty, that's extra, that's great bonus.

00:34:41.907 --> 00:34:43.570
But you want them to buy.

00:34:43.570 --> 00:34:47.251
So the buy box, the buy button, comes with.

00:34:47.251 --> 00:34:51.315
I think it's called product collection or something, but it's something that you can.

00:34:51.315 --> 00:35:00.880
You know you can just select in your store page design, but you can lead with a video and then just have all the products that kind of help.

00:35:00.880 --> 00:35:03.202
Help them solve the problem, right there.

00:35:04.023 --> 00:35:05.724
I love this strategy.

00:35:05.724 --> 00:35:12.177
You're basically creating a sales funnel right there on Amazon specifically for a keyword.

00:35:12.177 --> 00:35:26.777
You're turning the sponsored brand headline in the top of the funnel but really it's the bottom of the funnel, just like you said, because they're ready to purchase that stainless steel garlic press and they see that in the headline, they see that on the landing page and they can purchase right there without seeing any competitor ads.

00:35:26.777 --> 00:35:28.007
I love that strategy.

00:35:29.250 --> 00:35:32.159
Yeah, yeah, I mean, why show them a plastic or a yellow?

00:35:32.159 --> 00:35:38.496
You know, you know, garlic press when you, when, when they're looking for stainless steel, one don't distract them.

00:35:38.496 --> 00:35:39.786
You know they're ready to buy.

00:35:39.806 --> 00:35:41.771
I love that yeah, and I think that's you know they're ready to buy.

00:35:41.791 --> 00:35:45.898
I love that, yeah, that, and I think that's you know.

00:35:46.460 --> 00:35:53.570
What's important about just ppc in general is, as these different ad types roll out, is understanding how to leverage those fully.

00:35:53.590 --> 00:36:01.150
And that is such a great example of how to use something like sponsored brand in a different way than what most people are used to.

00:36:01.150 --> 00:36:18.954
And I think just staying up to date with what those placements look like and what they're capable of doing because of the two fairly recent examples that I feel like have come out in the last year, that can be really powerful for brands is, first of all, having that sponsor brand video.

00:36:18.954 --> 00:36:37.498
Now you can essentially have that as a headline ad where, instead of showing static images, now it can be a video which, especially if you're a higher priced product and you're competing on the fact that you're a better product and a better brand, obviously a video tells a much better story than you can with a couple of images.

00:36:37.498 --> 00:36:47.659
And then back to what you were saying with sponsor display, kind of that same thing of targeting competitors, and you can do the same thing.

00:36:47.659 --> 00:36:51.032
Not only sponsor product targeting has been around for a long time.

00:36:51.032 --> 00:36:55.534
Sponsor display is a little bit newer and you can actually do sponsor display video targeting as well.

00:36:55.764 --> 00:37:11.177
So just how much capabilities Amazon is giving to video for competitor targeting, I think is very useful for brands out there that everybody has access to, and those are, you know, really good call outs that you have for just how to leverage those different ad types.

00:37:12.284 --> 00:37:19.224
Right, yeah, and you know, nowadays, with the help of chat, gpt, you can, you can build out a lot with very little investment.

00:37:19.224 --> 00:37:34.170
So just to give you an example, you know, when we do ASIN harvesting from our auto campaigns or category targeting campaigns, we get a list of B zeros, right, there's a bunch of unreadable ASINs, right.

00:37:34.170 --> 00:37:38.844
And so how do you decide at that point whether to target all of them?

00:37:38.844 --> 00:37:44.117
Some of them put them in small groups, target them individually, like, how do you do that?

00:37:44.117 --> 00:37:55.240
Right, so you can actually use ChatGPT and even some of the other LLMs to kind of get translate that list into the actual products.

00:37:55.240 --> 00:38:05.385
You can even copy that list into something like a Helium 10 or a DataDive to get more details about that product before you just decide to put them into a campaign.

00:38:05.827 --> 00:38:08.911
You don't want to shortcut those steps.

00:38:08.911 --> 00:38:17.695
You don't want to just be casual about picking up all these targets and then just doing product targeting with them.

00:38:17.695 --> 00:38:32.574
You want to find all those products that are more expensive or have fewer reviews or have fewer ratings than yours, because then you want to make your product look better, you want to make yourself look good on their listing.

00:38:32.574 --> 00:38:36.795
That's when you can actually you know design for success.

00:38:36.795 --> 00:38:45.431
You want to design all your PPC efforts for the outcome that you're looking for, and ChatGPT makes that pretty easy.

00:38:46.715 --> 00:39:04.547
Yeah Well, and I think kind of segueing on data, one of the other things that I have in the notes here is talking about and I think, again, this is one of those pieces that, from broad strokes perspective, has been talked about a lot, which is search query report and that data.

00:39:04.547 --> 00:39:12.315
However, I still think that sellers really struggle with how to actually how to turn that data into action when it comes to the search query report.

00:39:12.315 --> 00:39:25.217
So how do you think about that, using that data and putting it into your data ecosystem in order to make decisions on your PPC strategy?

00:39:27.445 --> 00:39:42.313
Yeah, so we've actually rolled out a whole system around downloading SQP reports, stitching them together, because we don't want to just look at snapshots, right, we want to stitch data together over time so that you can see trends.

00:39:42.313 --> 00:39:45.090
You can also see data across ASINs.

00:39:45.090 --> 00:39:55.315
So what you want to do as a first step is to start downloading your monthly by ASIN SQP data and then you want to stitch it together.

00:39:55.315 --> 00:39:57.885
Either you do it yourself or you use a service.

00:39:57.885 --> 00:40:05.130
I can just say that you know we do have a service, in case anyone's interested, but that will help you put everything together.

00:40:05.130 --> 00:40:08.382
Now, what's the destination where this data lives?

00:40:08.382 --> 00:40:24.835
You probably want to have a robust system, like a data warehouse, where you can put all this information into tables that can be quickly accessed, because otherwise what happens with that volume of data is that Excel or Google Sheets is going to break.

00:40:24.835 --> 00:40:30.016
They're going to break at some point in the sense that they won't be able to handle this much data.

00:40:30.016 --> 00:40:41.974
When you have like two years of like 20 products SQP monthly data, it's going to be hard for those to be performant and also even load, you know sometimes.

00:40:41.974 --> 00:40:52.713
So you want to create like a system where you can load up all your data into a data warehouse and then you can use a business intelligence tool like Looker Studio, which is another Google product.

00:40:52.713 --> 00:41:04.896
It's free and you can connect your data warehouse as the backend of Looker Studio and then do all kinds of analysis, like over time, create filters for certain search queries.

00:41:04.896 --> 00:41:09.240
You can also look for opportunities like the funnel analysis.

00:41:09.240 --> 00:41:10.284
We have a whole system.

00:41:10.284 --> 00:41:16.610
I wish I could show it, but it probably might be a little bit hard to show it because there's listeners of this podcast.

00:41:19.260 --> 00:41:28.885
Important KPI that is kind of important to kind of convey and explain is the strength metric for each of your search terms.

00:41:28.885 --> 00:41:36.041
The strength metric, the way we calculate, is the purchase share divided by impression share.

00:41:36.041 --> 00:41:44.880
If your purchase share is larger than your impression share, it means that you are dealing with a strong keyword, because if only you could increase your impression share.

00:41:44.880 --> 00:41:57.420
It means that you are dealing with a strong keyword Because if only you could increase your purchase share your sorry, if only you could increase your impression share, your purchase share will make sure that you, you know, start to see really good results.

00:41:57.420 --> 00:42:11.210
So if you can figure out your strength metric, that's one way of identifying searches that should be converted into single keyword campaigns and you should kind of go after them strategically.

00:42:11.751 --> 00:42:14.202
The second one is something called price.

00:42:14.202 --> 00:42:25.983
When you download your SQP report, they also give you the average price of products that are winning that search term, which is a huge thing that most people overlook, right?

00:42:25.983 --> 00:42:37.804
It's not visible in the search query performance unless you click on download and then you select comprehensive view or you customize your columns and then show the average price for a search query.

00:42:37.804 --> 00:42:46.972
If you do that, then you can actually see that, hey, you thought this keyword was a good keyword, but all of the products that are winning this keyword are $30 products.

00:42:46.972 --> 00:42:49.588
You have a $50 product or $100 product.

00:42:49.588 --> 00:42:52.248
There's no way you're going to win that keyword.

00:42:52.248 --> 00:42:55.380
Amazon is just not going to give it to you, right?

00:42:55.380 --> 00:43:07.172
So if you can be intelligent about that and actually verify that you're looking at the right searches, then you have a straightforward action plan after that.

00:43:07.172 --> 00:43:08.284
What is the action plan?

00:43:08.284 --> 00:43:16.106
You basically do a gap analysis between search query performance and your existing ad keyword list and see if there's any gaps.

00:43:16.106 --> 00:43:20.668
You're not actually either not getting impressions or not even advertising on those words.

00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:24.728
Pick up those words, create single keyword campaigns with them.

00:43:24.728 --> 00:43:28.228
Now should you do exact or should you do some other match type?

00:43:28.228 --> 00:43:30.942
We actually do two types of campaigns.

00:43:30.942 --> 00:43:32.565
One is exact, of course.

00:43:32.565 --> 00:43:35.050
The second one is broad match modifier.

00:43:35.050 --> 00:43:40.567
And so let's say your long tail keyword is running shoes for men.

00:43:40.567 --> 00:43:46.175
Let's say so, your broad match modifier would be plus running, plus shoes plus men.

00:43:46.175 --> 00:43:48.284
So that would be one long tail word.

00:43:48.284 --> 00:43:51.773
And then, of course, you have the exact match as well.

00:43:51.773 --> 00:44:04.663
So we create two sets of single keyword campaigns and what that does is that, while the exact match is good for search queries that are exactly matching that sequence in that exact same order, nothing out of place.

00:44:04.663 --> 00:44:07.690
That's great, but it doesn't have that much search volume.

00:44:07.690 --> 00:44:23.007
Mostly, you see, exact matches are starving for impressions, whereas broad match modifiers act as broad matches, but they're actually better than broad matches because they won't bring in kind of unclean data.

00:44:23.268 --> 00:44:25.211
Yeah, that's an important piece that you know.

00:44:25.211 --> 00:44:40.481
For listeners that may not be aware is that Amazon changed how broad match works about a year ago to where it is much, much broader than it was before and so, like you said, you get a lot more let's call it unqualified searches and clicks.

00:44:40.521 --> 00:45:01.438
That come into there where there's not really a whole lot of buyer intent, and so having that modifier and just exactly how you described it really helps get essentially what used to be the old broad, if you will, where you're getting those customers that have some intent but maybe didn't type in the exact phrase that you're targeting.

00:45:02.380 --> 00:45:04.143
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:45:04.244 --> 00:45:15.572
So let's say, if they typed in men's running shoes instead of running shoes for men, you will still be able to catch that through the broad match modifier, whereas you won't be able to catch that through exact match.

00:45:15.572 --> 00:45:23.746
And so if you have built up strength for certain long tail intent, you should try to convert that into the broad match equivalent.

00:45:23.746 --> 00:45:27.485
And just make sure you add negative keywords proactively.

00:45:27.485 --> 00:45:50.248
Don't wait for the system to tell you that this is, you know, a good negative candidate like you can always fortify your broad match modifier campaigns by just not allowing certain words to come through, because you know it right, it's, let's say, gosh, in this case, some color or something that you know, even if it does match, it's not the right one for your product.

00:45:50.248 --> 00:45:52.288
Just get rid of them proactively.

00:45:52.288 --> 00:45:57.572
So once you do that, you'll actually start to see your ranks, your keyword ranking, going up.

00:45:57.572 --> 00:45:59.246
We've actually tested this.

00:45:59.246 --> 00:46:07.974
Pick up your search query performance words, add them as single keyword campaigns and then you'll start to see your ranking going up on those, which is pretty cool.

00:46:09.139 --> 00:46:19.804
Yeah, and I would encourage people you know that can sound a little bit overwhelming when you talk about that whole process If you're like, okay, now I've got to do this across you know 50 or a hundred or you know 200 SKUs.

00:46:19.804 --> 00:46:27.050
Start with those hero SKUs, where you know you've already got a lot of traction where there's, you know, good volume and you've got good margins.

00:46:27.050 --> 00:46:35.336
And think about how you know, even if you took one of those you know kind of hero SKUs and applied this process, that you can see a lot of progress with that one SKU.

00:46:35.376 --> 00:46:49.878
And then, once you've got a process, you know, you've kind of got a good rhythm for that process, then you can expand it to, you know, your other SKUs?

00:46:49.878 --> 00:46:50.320
Yeah, I totally agree.

00:46:50.320 --> 00:46:56.860
Well, you've given listeners, I think, a lot of different, or at least a handful of different action items and really done a great job of you know, kind of walking through step-by-step on how to do them.

00:46:56.860 --> 00:47:02.438
Is there, you know, and we always like to leave with at least one action item.

00:47:02.438 --> 00:47:05.505
Is there one that you would that comes to your mind?

00:47:05.505 --> 00:47:11.530
As far as that, you would recommend kind of everything we talked about or maybe something that we didn't get a chance to touch on yet.

00:47:11.530 --> 00:47:15.262
You'd really recommend listeners take action on right away.

00:47:17.304 --> 00:47:22.891
Yeah, so I think you know I love data, so for me it's kind of easier to talk about data.

00:47:22.891 --> 00:47:33.603
But I do think that, while our listeners might think that they are in the business of selling products, honestly, they're in the business of leveraging data.

00:47:33.603 --> 00:47:45.452
So the sooner they can understand that it's all about the data, starting from sourcing to, you know, strategizing to being profitable Everything is about data.

00:47:45.452 --> 00:47:58.311
So I would say, invest early on, as early as you can Invest in setting up a data ecosystem that can help you react quickly to changes to data that's coming in.

00:47:58.773 --> 00:48:03.407
Amazon is giving us an amazing platform where data is readily available.

00:48:03.407 --> 00:48:08.731
It's not like a billboard that you set up and months later you discover, oh, my billboard did nothing.

00:48:08.731 --> 00:48:10.702
You know, it's like so instantaneous.

00:48:10.702 --> 00:48:11.806
You set up a campaign.

00:48:11.806 --> 00:48:22.422
Within hours you start to see data, and so I think investing in the right data ecosystem early on is probably the best thing that you can do for your business.

00:48:22.422 --> 00:48:29.507
You know, so there's lots of data, but then you need to streamline that and just be on top of it is what I would like to say.

00:48:31.431 --> 00:48:31.672
Okay.

00:48:31.672 --> 00:48:41.166
So when you say data ecosystem, is that having a software solution or something, some sort of solution in order to house?

00:48:41.166 --> 00:48:55.501
First thing I think of is PPC data, because normally Amazon only gives you 60 days worth of data and it's so much more valuable to have, you know, six, 12 months or more worth of data where you can have a much fuller picture.

00:48:55.501 --> 00:49:01.371
So what are maybe a couple of the different data?

00:49:01.371 --> 00:49:11.554
You know we talk about PPC, but are there other data sources that you think are kind of at that very top of the list that sellers need to have into their ecosystem?

00:49:11.554 --> 00:49:18.666
And then what do you recommend as far as the best way to kind of access that data and turn it into action steps?

00:49:20.186 --> 00:49:20.567
Yeah.

00:49:20.646 --> 00:49:33.016
So I think the first thing to remember is that the data that you have sitting inside of Amazon, like your business reports or, you know, let's say, your inventory reports and so on they're all snapshots.

00:49:45.139 --> 00:49:49.634
So the sooner you can convert snapshots into trend lines or to time series, the better for you, because you don't want to look at data as a snapshot in time because it's evolving Like.

00:49:49.634 --> 00:49:50.476
You want to be able to see those trends.

00:49:50.476 --> 00:49:55.047
So when I say data ecosystem, you want to set up a system where data is flowing in.

00:49:55.047 --> 00:50:14.126
You know, either you set up a VA who downloads stuff and then stitches things together with dates so that you can start to build trend lines and be able to detect anomalies and things like that, or you connect, you know, different streams of data through APIs, and APIs are just, you know, pipes.

00:50:14.126 --> 00:50:20.505
They're sort of pipes that can transmit Amazon's data into your system, like a data warehouse or something.

00:50:20.505 --> 00:50:32.126
You can set up those pipes so that you always have fresh data and you don't have to go to Amazon and say, okay, give me the last 30 days, that's a snapshot, you know you don't want to have to do last 30 days.

00:50:32.547 --> 00:50:53.967
You don't want aggregates over 30 day periods, you want daily data that comes in, or even if you have monthly data, you still need to be able to put them all together with a time column, so that adding a time column by itself is the act of turning a snapshot into a time series, because now you can plot it, the moment you start having plottable data.

00:50:53.967 --> 00:50:59.351
Then you know trends, you can see where the things are falling off a cliff or things are picking up and so on.

00:50:59.351 --> 00:51:01.728
Then you have your ad data, right.

00:51:01.728 --> 00:51:12.081
So you have organic data, you have ad data, you also have keyword rank tracking data and all of these are kind of separate silos, almost right.

00:51:12.101 --> 00:51:17.333
So, if you can, you know I speak a lot about data room, this concept of data room.

00:51:17.333 --> 00:51:35.126
So if you want to, just maybe I don't know Google it or something that we've been talking about creating data pipelines that connect different sources of data into a data warehouse which then allows you to join on common parameters like date or like skew things like that.

00:51:35.126 --> 00:51:42.228
So I know it sounds a little programmy and might sound a little bit intimidating, but let it sink in because it's coming.

00:51:42.228 --> 00:51:47.065
You know you won't be able to find a single piece of software that does everything.

00:51:47.306 --> 00:51:54.547
You will have, you know, kind of disparate sources of data that you'll have to stitch together at your end to make sense of it.

00:51:54.547 --> 00:51:55.130
Right?

00:51:55.130 --> 00:51:57.342
You'll have to do it at some point.

00:51:57.342 --> 00:52:04.110
Either you're already doing it or you'd have to come up with a system that brings all of this together in order to be on top of things.

00:52:04.110 --> 00:52:06.367
Right, Because things are getting more and more competitive.

00:52:07.021 --> 00:52:10.420
You won't find a piece of software, and even if you do, it's going to be so expensive.

00:52:10.420 --> 00:52:16.588
It'll have all the bells and whistles of like an all-in-one tool and you won't use most of it, right?

00:52:16.588 --> 00:52:20.125
So that's the downside of just seeking out out-of-the-box package solution that does everything for you.

00:52:20.125 --> 00:52:31.623
They out-of-the-box package solution that does everything for you, they're going to be expensive and they won't satisfy your specific custom needs, and they're going to have bells and whistles that you won't use.

00:52:31.623 --> 00:52:36.132
So the quicker you can start to think through what kind of system do I need?

00:52:36.132 --> 00:52:40.429
What is the minimum data that I need to make my decisions?

00:52:40.429 --> 00:52:41.291
Do I need Keepa?

00:52:41.291 --> 00:52:43.567
Do I need RankTrack?

00:52:43.567 --> 00:52:44.369
What do I need?

00:52:44.369 --> 00:52:48.806
And then you start to think about the pieces and how you can put them together.

00:52:48.806 --> 00:52:49.481
Again.

00:52:49.481 --> 00:52:50.806
This may not be enough.

00:52:51.539 --> 00:53:06.423
I think we need another podcast to talk about the data stuff because we don't have so much time, but I just want to leave you with that thought that having a data ecosystem mindset to start with is the first step and then you can build on that.

00:53:06.423 --> 00:53:10.440
There's lots of literature out there on how you can get to that point and be comfortable with it.

00:53:11.202 --> 00:53:13.309
Yeah, fantastic, and I 100% agree.

00:53:13.309 --> 00:53:31.010
As Amazon gets more complex, that data just becomes more and more important and having the data and having a you know some sort of system in place or ecosystem in order to turn that data into some insights and then eventually into some actions in order to drive your brand forward.

00:53:31.010 --> 00:53:42.030
So folks that want to learn more about you, ritu, or keep up with what you're doing with data and PPC, ninja and everything else where's a good place for them to kind of connect with you?

00:53:43.400 --> 00:53:44.001
Yeah, linkedin.

00:53:44.001 --> 00:53:47.144
So, yeah, just my full name R-I-T-U-J-A-V-A.

00:53:47.144 --> 00:53:54.634
I'm active on LinkedIn and I love to share all the new stuff that we're working on and you know, feel free to reach out to me there.

00:53:55.615 --> 00:53:55.976
Perfect.

00:53:55.976 --> 00:54:07.146
Well, thank you so much for all the actionable items that you gave to our listeners.

00:54:07.146 --> 00:54:10.038
I think that they've got quite a few things now on their to-do list and just giving them some insights into that concept of a data ecosystem.

00:54:10.038 --> 00:54:12.822
I appreciate it and thank you so much for being on the podcast.

00:54:13.664 --> 00:54:14.746
Yeah, thank you so much John.

00:54:14.746 --> 00:54:15.586
Thank you so much Matt.

00:54:15.586 --> 00:54:17.367
It was a pleasure hanging out with you guys.

00:54:17.809 --> 00:54:18.250
Thanks, Ritu.