010: Mastering the Balancing Act: Strategies for Thriving on Amazon and at Home with Elizabeth Greene

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome everybody to the Brand Fortress HQ podcast. I'm your host, jeff Stogen, and today I'm excited to have Elizabeth Green from Jungler with us. Elizabeth Green has been involved in the Amazon space, running her agency and really focusing on helping sellers get to that eight-figure mark. She knows a thing or two about being an expert at scaling with simplicity and, on her personal life, she has six kids from the ages of five to 13 that she races with her husband, and she takes those principles, both on Amazon and also in her personal life, to really move brands forward. So, elizabeth, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 2: 0:38

Yeah, no thanks for having me. When you reached out to me like, hey, I want to be the first on the podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:45

I feel honored to think so much about having me. Yeah. So for folks that aren't familiar with you, I'd love to dive a little bit into your background. But before we do that, I do have to ask. So you know, six kids under the age of five and 13,. Well, running a top-notch agency talked to me a little bit about how you find that balance, Because I have two kids and my wife and I were like, okay, it was too scary to go from man to man to zone defense. So what are some of those things that you feel like transfer really well between those two worlds?

Speaker 2: 1:22

Yeah, I'd probably just Working to simplify and prioritize. This is a trick. I think it's a trick to life when you have more things to manage. I cannot survive unless.

Speaker 1: 1:35

I learn from this, so probably a lot of things that cross the zone and I get asked that question.

Speaker 2: 1:46

Yeah, okay. Remember already you're not going to go to the wolves Try and not worry about the rest of it as much as you possibly can, and then I look at doing a business or yeah, okay, I gotta take my own advice.

Speaker 1: 2:02

I gotta relearn that lesson. So it's kind of a reinforcement between those two worlds. Yeah, definitely. I think half of it is not really, so it makes your face to me to see how I feel in my personal life is pretty chill, but that means that I'm not running around trying to try everything done and that's honestly not working.

Speaker 2: 2:30

Prioritizing. I'm not going to go to distance. Allow myself not to stress about what.

Speaker 1: 2:36

I believe in Gotcha I could see how that would serve you really well on Amazon, because I feel like, as time goes on, there's a lot more shiny objects and little bells and whistles and all these different things that we can chase that Amazon loves to give us and, quite frankly, as brands love to give ourselves. At the same time, where it's driving traffic from off Amazon and this ad type and that ad type and creative and all these other types of things, but really focusing on where you could have the most leverage and, kind of like I said, how you want to play that game. So I think that that's a really good way for brands to look at it and think about more strategically how they want to move forward. So before we kind of dive into you know what you're really good at ads and that type of stuff. For folks that aren't familiar with you, tell us a little bit about your backgrounds. Did you start out? You know like, hey, I know I want to do this Amazon thing, or what did it look like before you got involved with Amazon?

Speaker 2: 3:35

Yeah, yeah. So story in getting it from mom for context, for context, a lot of kids. We all said we all love them. So life is life and so you can agree with that With a side gig, that's all. That's all. It's probably good with it. You know, this is still for we're trying to work like online, you know, some sort of split, split job job. The intent and goal is, you know, having having income the laws to together to sleep, my husband, my husband who found her, and and which was which was arbitrage, arbitrage and beginning. Play. Well, because that much wound down, down and were were the last 20 or 20. That's easy, double the babies, double the babies, pretty much. Such that was fun, fun, it's fun, it's going into that.

Speaker 1: 4:31

It's only let us into. Let us into the world Advertising, Advertising and so so context, or when we got started.

Speaker 2: 4:38

got started or the or the retypes got, got, got got got. Okay, auto inch was, was, was. Uh, I want to see, I want to see 18, 18. When that happened, when that happened, everybody no, no, no, no, she didn't take a, she didn't take a, she didn't take a, she didn't take a. It was like, it was like they started, started up, they, I love, love, love, love, love and. And then it seems like it seems like it's a little bit of color, the, the, the, the patient, the patient was was Um, do I need, do I need, to run? I'm right, question, question. How do I run? How do I run? Become much more, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:15

And I think that that's a good point of just having that length of time to have um live through kind of the difference, um iterations of Amazon, because I feel like every six months or so we go through this uh process where we're like, oh, there's this big change coming on Amazon and everything's going to change and it's all going to be different. And in the reality of it is is that these come constantly and you know, brands that succeed learn how to, how to adapt and unfortunately, brands who don't adapt um usually don't uh aren't able to compete and stay around real long. Um, I'm curious, when you started out at arbitrage, are there any things that you remember from kind of the arbitrage days that were kind of ridiculous products or things that were you were like how is this somebody, people, really buy this?

Speaker 2: 6:08

I don't think I remember anything ridiculous. We weren't really large scale. I did learn very quickly make sure that not only is a product sellable, but it's un-gated. Oh, this is awesome, this is something for great. Look how cheap it is. I'm like oh shoot, it's a brand that I've got on. That's the hard list to learn.

Speaker 1: 6:39

I think that's one of those moments where you kind of shake your fist at the computer for a few minutes as you struggle at the Amazon. That I feel like we've we've all been through. So you made the switch from arbitrage over to private label. Are you uh okay sharing what you uh what used to sell private label?

Speaker 2: 6:58

Yeah, no, super like small consumable products. I always say, um, we did Amazon the way. You should not get into an Amazon business which is like, hey, let's try this, let's dip our toes in the water, which I mean like context, for back then I think that was kind of viable. Now to your point of things getting much more sophisticated and needing to know your numbers, there was less competition, which means there's more wiggle room to get things wrong because you're not like it's not as cut throat. So it was I. It was small potatoes like can consume more bowls. Um, kitchenware.

Speaker 1: 7:37

Okay, very cool, and I think that that's such a a good you know, proving ground is seeing it from that brand perspective and private label, um, and really understanding working with brands. You know people that start out with sellers. I feel like have a very different perspective than you know if you're working with an agency or even somebody within an agency that's never actually been a seller themselves. It doesn't mean that they can't be good at being um. You know an advertiser or creative advertiser, you know those other roles that we need on Amazon, um, but I think it does give you a unique perspective. When you've had your own product, try building your own brand on Amazon and kind of have, I think, a closer understanding of what those struggles feel like. Um. So how did you transition from private label into um, starting the agency?

Speaker 2: 8:27

Yes, so this was back before the Facebook groups were kind of a mess. They're a bit messed now and it seems like everyone's kind of moved on to LinkedIn, which is by far my biggest platform for um putting out content. But, um, like I said, the the autos were getting split out in the or the targeting was getting split out in the autos um place, a percentage is kind of rolled out. So there was a lot of shifts and changes to the platform and there was. So there's a lot of people asking questions and the Facebook groups were really big source and I credit people um who got started well before me at really developing and bringing in a really good space for sellers to ask those questions. Um, like I said, now it's a bit of a uh the mess to be honest, that's probably the nicest way to put it, yeah. And I don't know I'm listening or like watching some of the comments down, like no, no no, it's so bad, but back in the day you could get some really good, solid answers. And so people started naturally asking questions about Amazon advertising. Like I said, context was do I need to run ads? So there's a lot of people trying to figure it out, like can I start small budgets? Like where should I start? What should that look like? And because we had, I had the experience, I all had the answers to the questions. So I was, you know, just kind of looking at getting back into selling a little bit more after my twins were born, and so I was just I was in those groups and so I started answering people's questions and then allowed to someone going oh hey, you guys, you know, could you help with this? And like sure, so kind of how we got started. And my current marketing philosophy is be really nice, give as much as possible, and it always seems to come back in dividends. So that's really how we got started.

Speaker 1: 10:21

Okay, and then you know for today. Well, you know, fast forwarding to where things are today, I think something to take away for listeners and something that I personally do is, you know, think about or be very careful of where you're getting that advice from, because I feel like now there's, you know, ever there's a thousand different opinions on something, especially something as complex as Amazon ads and Amazon PPC. It's gotten a lot more complex, and so that's where I personally you know I have a list of people on LinkedIn, you being one of those people where you know, looking at our content or if I've got questions. I think that's one of the beautiful things about LinkedIn is that you can reach out to people in the comments and that type of stuff, and you can still get really good answers. You just have to be very careful about the source of your information is going to really matter a lot as far as the quality of the answer that you get.

Speaker 2: 11:15

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think it really has to do with one just things getting a hectic ton more complicated and it also getting much more competitive. So there's less room for error these days when before, if you're paying like 10 cent cost per clicks yeah, if you get, you know, 10 clicks, you're spending a dollar. That wiggle room on error is any, any clicks, you know, without any conversions. Of course we would rather everything always convert all the time is not going to so, but my, my investment for those tests is significantly less, you know five years ago versus now. If I'm paying $2 a click, well, you know I get 10 clicks. That's, you know that's a decent chunk. I mean, obviously $20 is not going to kill you, hopefully. But if you extrapolate that out times testing, you know five, 10, 20 keywords that I can add up really, really fast. And so I think that's where really to your point vetting what information you're getting, where you're getting from it, how reliable is the source you want to make sure that you know you're not wasting all of that money because you got you got some kind of bad advice.

Speaker 1: 12:33

Yeah, and so I'm curious, you know, one thing that that you mentioned there and I see this a lot is how much Amazon has changed in the sense of I kind of feel like we as as brands got spoiled. You know, really in that kind of you know, 2015, 2016 until about 2020, where you know you could, you know at one time you could even bring things directly over from Alibaba and you could make a lot of money selling on Amazon. And then was, hey, I just need to modify the product a little bit, and now it's, you know, getting a lot more challenging. I'm curious, how does that discussion go with some of your you know, especially the new clients that come in to you as an agency as far as, like, hey, we want to be back to. You know 15% ACOS and 5% tacos and we hit those numbers in 2019. So now we want to hit them in, you know 2024. Are you still seeing those conversations and, if so, what's kind of your take on that?

Speaker 2: 13:37

I do have those conversations on occasion. Right now we can be a little bit more picky with the brands that we take on, and so we try and partner with brands who we know that we can succeed with. So if your expectation is for a 5% total ACOS, just because of how my brain works and how I'm able to make sense of it, is mathematically so the way I would make sense. Or have that conversation at least for me again, because this is my comfort zone. I have other team leads who are like, oh my gosh, I can't do that math on the fly. I'm like it's just how my brain works. Don't feel like you know you can't do. It's good work if you can't do math on the fly, but for me it's like okay, we know 5%, let's do like short math. You know 5%, let's do 10%, so my brain can make it work. You know 10% of $10,000 is $1,000. And if you take okay, so that's my ad spend, because that's what the percentage looks like. I'm a big aggregate for figuring out how much sometimes just that is illuminating. So, for example, if maybe the brand has lost market share and maybe they're dealing with sales hopefully not, but you know, if they're playing at that close to the S, it might be dealing with market share loss. Instead of like, oh, we want 5%. You're like well, 5%, when you were doing it three years ago you know you only had to spend $5,000. And now, because things have decreased, you know that 5% might only be a couple grand like percentages sometimes can get you. So I'm a huge advocate for like okay, well, what does that percentage look like? And then what are our cost per clicks look like? And how many cost per clicks does that ad budget support? And what you'll find when you do those mathematics is. It becomes very illuminating. You're like oh, wow, I can only get half the clicks I used to for the same ad budget. Hopefully it's not half, hopefully it's maybe a little bit higher than that, but I mean, in some marketplaces it is and are. The brands will say, oh, you know, we used to rank on this main keyword. A lot of it comes down to how competitive the products are in this space, meaning how good the conversion rates are, and that's one thing that I've really been happy with, particularly, in 2023, amazon's pushed to really get more data into the hands of sellers, particularly data surrounding competition In the form of the search query performance report. There's now the product opportunity explorer, brand metrics inside of the ad console. There's all of these ways now where you can benchmark your conversion rates, your stats, against your competition. And it used to be brands would ask like, hey, how are we doing versus our competitors? I mean, everybody wants to know that. Am I still competitive? How am I doing? Am I fully behind? And it used to be like well, you're ranking on more keywords than Helium 10 says your competition is, so I guess we're good. But there wasn't any real true defined numbers where now there's first party data that says, hey, we're lagging behind what our competitors are doing and that's probably the reason we're losing market share. It might not necessarily be that we're not running as sophisticated ads Maybe you are, maybe you aren't I'll do a shameless plug Go get an audit, we'll give you one for free. But you know like it's way more all encompassing these days, to your point of the competition. That's really why you have to look at it from all facets. There's many more people who are offering something to the consumer that they might as much as it's painful to admit sometime like more than your product or your listing and that's where most brands run into trouble with market share is not Doing what Amazon is focused on and continuously looking at the consumer and say how can we serve them better?

Speaker 1: 17:37

Yeah, I think that's what two things that I think are really important. There is, first of all and I've seen brands really hurt themselves by essentially trying to swim upstream with Amazon where they're trying to fight the system, whether that be try it, hey, I know that my audience will buy off this keyword and even though they have the ad data that is probably some of the best data that you can get that proves otherwise or they're trying to fulfill by merchant because they like that better than FBA or whatever. There's a bunch of different things where they're essentially fighting Amazon and I'm like it's going to be really hard for you if you're fighting Amazon. And then, the other thing that I think that's really important you brought up and I know, you know, I feel like it's getting a little bit more love, but probably not as much love as it really deserves which is that search query report. Because one thing to know hey, my product converts at, you know 10%, and I can look and I can say, okay, the category average is 7%. So great, I'm doing well. But with that search query report you can really dive into, okay, which of these keywords am I doing best on and where is that opportunity? What else from that search query reports do you find you know, really helpful and maybe something that you look at on a consistent basis?

Speaker 2: 19:09

Yeah, I think it may want to. Conversion rates also, click the rates and just like your share of the traffic. One thing to keep in mind for anyone who's not dived into search query reports, you've probably seen these questions all over the place. People like wait, why is the volume in search query so much slower than what I'm seeing in my advertising? Like I can explicitly say like oh, I got, you know, 10 sales through this one search. If I look at my advertising and yet search query performance is telling me that I only got five sales. That makes no sense and I would say it has to do with the differences. Whenever you're combining different data sets on Amazon, you need to be very clear as to how those data sets are reported. That's why sessions in the business support will contain advertising metrics, but clicks and sessions are not a one to one as far as how they're reported. You end up with like weirdness like that, and that's the same with the search query report. So whenever you're comparing things with like apples to apples, meaning two point search query is insanely powerful. What is my conversion rate versus my competition within the same report with the same data set, then you're going to get some really good information. Now that can be helpful to your point to carry that over into advertising, which is something we definitely do, like you know, where am I converted better than my competition? Where am I maybe not pushing my ads as heavy as I could be, even though I know I'm doing better than my competitor? So that's a great point for us to then go into the ad console, make those changes and then push the product to ideally gain more market share there. So again, it could be really, really helpful. But again, if you're trying to do apples to apples on stuff, there's so many reports that don't line up. Give me an assistant for your rating, but there's so many reports that don't line up in Amazon.

Speaker 1: 20:58

And I think that's a great point because everybody expects when they. You know, data coming first party from data coming first party from Amazon is really useful and we have more data than we've ever had before, which is fantastic. But there are limitations to those data and understanding that you know. As infuriating as it can be looking at that change over time, you know at least what I found is more important than necessarily trying to get all the data to line up perfectly to say, hey, are we moving in the right direction or are we not? And thinking of it, you know, more as a compass as opposed to a roadmap.

Speaker 2: 21:33

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Speaker 1: 21:36

So you know, talking about Amazon ads getting a lot more complicated. What are you know, maybe in the last six to 12 months, the big changes that you are seeing and how ads have gotten a lot more complicated?

Speaker 2: 21:56

Yeah. So in the beginning when I say the beginning, you know kind of like when we started up and then ongoing, it's been a lot more control, lovers, that they've given us. So, for example, the placement percentages, when those come out, holy heck, everybody freaked out. Everybody's like how the heck do I use this? So it's understanding how to leverage that. You know, with everything is driving towards trying to leverage all of the updates to enact better ad spend performance. Really, at the end of the day, advertising management is about good ad spend management. So it's just understanding how to pull on that level or lever. What are the things that enact on that lever? Again, how can I showcase myself to better audiences? Then we got access to things like you know, sponsor display came into the icon so I aced in targeting. That was huge when I came out. So just a lot more control. Because back in the day on occasion it was mostly through vendor accounts but you could get like some sponsor display placements from the auto so it would like randomly show up. But there was a little control and I'll take okay, here's a sponsor display ad, here's product targeting, you know, go hand with that. And then there was like audiences. But now there's like look back windows. So there's there's all these ways that we can segment and control who our ads are served to and then, to your point, how much, to the point of like ad spend control, how much are we paying when we serve these acts? Because that's the problem with, they say, auto campaigns or other sort of conglomerations is, when I show up here, I have this one lever, which is my bid, or potentially my campaign budget, that controls all these different placements, all these search placements, all these product page placements. It's I've one lever that controls everything. So how I can control this one thing is reduced to impossible. So with all of these additional layered controls and specifics, we got more access and more capabilities to say, okay, I want to show up exactly here and this is specifically how much I'm willing to pay for that placement. And I can. I can move levers much more incrementally, which is fabulous, and that means if you're a really good account manager, you can get some stellar results. It also means there's a lot to keep track of, like there's so many like there. It's like if I build it out like this and if I, you know, I can show up here, if I put this in here and do this, and so that was the one thing that we saw was just a movement towards more and more incremental control, and here's the end of 2023. There were a lot of changes that took away that control in the form of what search terms are triggered by match types. We saw an expansion of the search terms that are potentially triggered through broad match and sponsored product ads. Then we saw an expansion of the search terms that are triggered through exact match in sponsored brand campaigns, and this saw I'm trying to think what the other one was there was. There was one other one that like changed it. Oh, the off placement settings, which that is still like a very marginal amount of ad spend, but Amazon opened up sponsored product ads to now show off platform in some very limited case, and but there there's no like incremental levels of control on those places. It just it happens somewhere, we don't know we can, we can't stop it, we can't do anything about it. It just happens and there's there's no control over it. So that's been kind of interesting to navigate again, kind of figuring out, okay, when I can't control this, like what are the levers I can pull, what are the things that are in my control. What are the things that aren't in my control? To the point going back, trying to simplify, make your life easier. It's like, all right, these are the things you know. What is that that's saying? You know, lord, give me strength to control the things I can and to let go of the things that I can. I feel like I'm saying a lot these days, but it's in again. Is it's really trying to understand, as this kind of thing becomes more and more complicated? Again, understanding the levers, the things that are within your control, and then understanding what is the best way to again get the most efficiency out of my ad spend, giving the things that I have. That might just well so.

Speaker 1: 26:34

Yeah, I think that those are some great points in there as far as how things are changing, where, like, exact targets aren't exact as they were six months ago and some of the other changes that we're seeing. So, from a brand perspective for somebody that they're trying to look at it from more of a 10,000 foot level as the brand and maybe they're in the ads every day or maybe they have somebody that's doing that for them, how do you think about, from a big picture, setting those goals and then executing on goals for a brand?

Speaker 2: 27:16

Yeah, the biggest thing that I don't want to say we developed this last year more like definitely solidified as a really key ad. I don't know if you call it like a framework or a philosophy when it comes to really helping brands to your point, grow sales, which typically means growing ads spend in a very competitive landscape where you tend to get like less efficiency for how much you're spending, less scale for how much you're spending. Yet you can't infinitely scale that and just push your brand into unprofitability. And that has been this idea of managing strategy on a per product level, and when I say per product, I mean per listing or per parent ASIN. I kind of use all of those listing ASIN, product or parent ASIN interchangeably. The reason why we choose per listing as opposed to say per SKU or per child ASIN would be that that is the way that the traffic is funneled through ads. You essentially land on a listing, yes, you land on a specific child ASIN, but there are within that listing in case there's, lots of variations which can help simplify things a little bit, as we ended up a long way of managing several large clothing brands and so the complexity is if you zoom out or go down to a SKU level can be like unhelpful. So we just rolled it up to the listing level and that has helped to make much more sense of larger, complex accounts. And then, further than that, looking at ad spend and total sales attributions through a percentage of total lens. So again, I'm a huge fan of okay, we know that this one is this best seller. By how much is your best seller driving 75% of your total sales volume? Or is it driving 25% of your total sales volume? The impact of those two product lines? If you have a product driving 75%, you better watch that thing like a hawk. As goes that product, so goes the account. If you had to focus on nothing other than keeping that best seller in stock, that would be well worth your time. Now you probably want to look deeper into the catalog to see if you can kind of get off of that like sole focus and all of your eggs in my basket. But that immediately adds such clarity as to where my focus goes, versus if I had, say, three to four products that are making up that sort of big top chunk of my sales volume. Now I have three to four places to focus on and where I find that brands can really screw themselves profitability-wise is not taking a very strong look at that. So we look at terms of impact Again, we're factoring in ad spend percentages as well, just because, again, we're an ad agency, so we need to keep that in mind. We look at percentages of total sales, percentages of total ad spend, again on a per listing level, to gauge impact. And then what we're doing is we're zooming out and we're looking again. For us it's things that are related to the ads. You also could do this with factoring in profitability as well. So it's like impact on the total account. Then what we call again for us, we call ad efficiencies, meaning a cost total, a cost percentage of what we call ad sale percentage, which is like what percentage of my total sales are coming from advertising. Ad conversion rate versus unit session percentage. So we're looking at impact and then we're looking at efficiency on that impact. So if I have a high impact item that's struggling with, say, profitability, well, even if it is the best seller, if it's not bringing in the most revenue, it's probably actually not my point to focus on. So, if you can, and then you start managing ad strategy to those buckets. So I said, okay, these are my top buckets. These are the ones where I probably should allocate the most time resources, spend strategy. But the problem that happens all often time is that brands won't do a thorough analysis on their product lines. This happens all that, you know. Like over the years you launch a whole bunch of products and there's kind of some out there. They're like the ones that, like I launched that a year ago and now I feel like, and I hear so many brands and I sympathize with, they're kind of stuck in this limbo and they're like I know I have these product lines. I don't feel like they've gotten a fair shake, so I don't really want to just continue them, because I feel as if there might be something there. I have all these products that are already on Amazon. I already got the factory coming and like I already have everything in place. If I could just get this thing to work. But I don't know if it's not working just because there's no traffic, or is it a dead product, I don't know. So they kind of like they look at it every once in a while or every six months and they're like I have no idea what to do. I just don't think about it and it runs for another six months. The next thing you know there's three years later and they have this really large catalog. So oftentimes what happens is an ad agency will come in or somebody will say, oh okay, I want to grow my brand, so they'll start shoving ad spend into every single bucket and what happens is that you're going to have products with high efficiencies in ad spend, meaning typically because they have really strong conversion rates, they have really strong market share, they're strong products. It's really easy to push those and see significant returns. But then you oftentimes if you're putting it into the rest of the again that bottom half of the catalog, where you're like I want to see if this works, if you build out a really robust and really significant ad spend strategy, oftentimes the sales volume of those products just can't support that. It makes no sense. So that's where you end up with wild profitability. Whenever it was like oh, I just want to test and grow sales. And the next thing you know like your total cost doubles and you're like well, I didn't want to get no profits this month, that wasn't the goal. So it's about just kind of understanding again how each product line relates to that sales growth, to that profitability and then making strategic decisions based on that impact.

Speaker 1: 33:36

Yeah, and I think that the first steps of that, most brands probably have a gut instinct, but actually doing the math and looking at it, okay, over the last 30 days, 60 days, six months, 12 months, you know what does my spread look like for those products? You know, of my products that are driving that revenue and I mean, I feel like this is such an old trope but it's still so true which is that you know, probably 20% of your products are driving 80% of your revenue and profit. So, yeah, I think it's so. That's a great point and I like how you kind of explained you know the action, the impact portion of it to go beyond just okay, here's my top line sales. But also, look at you know where I'm allocating my ad spends and putting those. You know kind of seems obvious when you say it out loud, but I, you know, I agree with you, I've seen it so many times where you know they're putting their ad spend in a product that, quite frankly, isn't really working because they're hoping that it's going to work at the expense of, you know, tried and true product that you know really has done well over time and continues to do well maybe not 2018 well, but still, you know, delivers really really well. So I'm curious, when you have that, you know, discussion with brands, what, what are kind ofGu largely has Academy Provider to logical broadly means I think so, yes, this is some your criteria and or how do you think about this, and maybe you know, obviously brands might feel differently. But as a little bit of an outside observer where you go, you know it's time to retire this product and maybe try something new.

Speaker 2: 35:14

Yeah, where we come in is we often just give advice, say like, hey, this is what we're seeing in the market, this is what we're seeing, and a lot of it is just mathematics, right. Like if your conversion rate is 2% and the cost per click is $2, you can actually factor on average. It's actually pretty easy. So you factor on average how many clicks does it take to convert to a sale, which is one divided by your conversion rate in decimal form? And then you say, okay, now that I have, oh great, it takes me 50 clicks to convert to a sale. That's a lot. And now, if I'm even paying just a dollar on those clicks, that's $50 to convert to an order on average. Right, you're going to have some keywords that work better some viewers or not and it becomes very illuminating. And all of a sudden you go wait, why am I doing this investment? This makes no sense. It's going to be very difficult to make this thing work. It's going to be very difficult to make this thing profitable and it's not because a lot of times, it's not because the brands are doing anything wrong from an advertising perspective. Don't get me wrong. I've seen some do'sies in the audits, but for a lot of times it's just they're going up against a very competitive market and the conversion rates are not strong enough to sustain how competitive they're being with the ads. So you pivot, you try and find a less competitive way to get the product out there. Or maybe you pull back and just say, well, this product's going to do what it's going to do, but I can no longer afford to continuously lose money on this product line. So it's really just having the conversation like that and there will be a lot of times where, again, just due to the product kind of sitting there, well, we'll make the recommendation. Like you know, it doesn't make sense to push this product and the brand will come back with yeah, we know that we've kind of known it for a while, but we also have, like a significant stock investment here. So we need you to keep doing what you're doing because you know there's extended raising. So those kind of conversations are why I'm hesitant to say like, all right, let's just not advertise. You know we're going to make an exacting decision here. It's more interfacing with them and saying, okay, what does the brand need? Okay, yeah, the inventory levels are that? All right, let's see what we can maintain here. Okay, we're not going to get profitable. But you know, given slight unprofitability versus massive storage fees in three months, let's just see what we can push out the door now, knowing that that's going to be cheaper than a removal order. You know like there's ways you should look at it as opposed to just saying okay, given the numbers and my report that I'm looking at, that gives me no context on your business structure, I feel like we should be doing this Right and I think you know kind of back to what you were talking about before, which is just having that plan and identifying that too.

Speaker 1: 37:59

You know it doesn't mean that you need to fire, sale it or you need to. You know, recall all that inventory for a product that's not working. But you should have a plan for exiting out of that product or at least transitioning to a point where you know maybe, instead of being that you know home run that you were hoping it was going to be, that ends up being a base hit, and sometimes that's okay. When you know you have products in there where you may only sell you know 50, 100, 200 of them a month but because you're not trying to push them harder than what the market is ready for, you know you can take some incremental wins that actually add up pretty nicely when you look at your you know net profit at the end of the day yeah, yeah, no, I would 100% agree with that. So I have one noted here, as far as you know, kind of advice from you that you submitted, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how to identify and fix your mixed ad spend. Tell me a little bit about what you mean by fixed ad spend and what brands should be looking at.

Speaker 2: 39:09

Yes, that is a great one. So that is one of the roadblocks to. I'm saying like oh, we should get incremental strategy and we need to be doing it on a per listing level and we need to get granular and we need to, you know, have good ad spend control. Mixed ad spend is a roadblock to that and you cannot fix your incremental strategy until you fix the next ad spend. So I should define what it is Mixed ad spend for us at least. How we classify it is campaigns that contain products on more than one listing. It's typically what I mean. The reason why that can be a problem is to going to back to the point of like priority products, things we're pushing, things we're not pushing. If we go in and we identify that, okay, this main product, we think we should significantly invest more ad spend in it. And then you know, these other, lesser products, we need to pull back ad spend. If I have like let's go extreme. Let's say, if I had one campaign for all of my products which is a terrible idea, never do that. Like you need more than one campaign with everything, but like that would be the very extreme example I would go, okay, I need to increase ad spend here and to the point of going back to like the ad spend control and like how many levers you have to pull in that control. I got one, I got one campaign. So if I wanted to be more aggressive here, be less aggressive here, I have to build out that ad structure before I can even implement that strategy and that's why that becomes just sort of a really big issue when it comes to again really scaling up the thing that a lot I don't know if it's a misconception, but a lot of people will hear of like mixed campaigns where there's a common which I would agree with ad structure of like one campaign, one ad group, one product line or some people do like one ASIN or one SKU or whatever. Right, I think a lot of people hear that and think, oh, that's going to perform the best and that's why you guys are saying that. The thing is, is that that's not true? Oftentimes these like mixed campaigns, or I lovingly call them Franken campaign. You know ones with like 20 different ad groups and half of them are paused and you got like random stuff. You test it in there and you're looking at it and you're like man the ASIN, this is killer, like this is. It works really well and it's the structure we advocate for is not because the Franken campaigns don't work. Sometimes you are absolute annoyance. They work better than anything else we're doing incrementally. But where you run into problems is again that mixed ad spend and the limited amounts of things that you can control on a per product level, and that's where that really starts to hinder your scale. If you're looking at okay, I really want to get intentional with my ad strategy, you find that your options are limited to none If that's the only ad strategy you're running.

Speaker 1: 42:15

Yeah, and I think that's important for people to take away is that the amount of control that it gives you when you have a much more granular structure. Just to kind of give an example so if you had all your products and you had it in a campaign and add $100 budget for each day, essentially what you're doing is you're saying you're handing Amazon that $100 and saying, hey, you spend it how you think is best. Now, the Amazon algorithm is fairly smart, so, like you said, sometimes those franken campaigns, amazon will figure it out and you'll actually end up with a pretty decent result. The problem is that if a campaign goes sideways or something changes, like you said, you don't really have the controls to make those adjustments and so you're just kind of stuck with what Amazon gives you, whereas, like you said, if you break that out a little bit more and I'm personally a big fan of breaking out as much as you possibly can within reason now we don't need to go to the other end of the spectrum that's like, hey, every product, every keyword needs to have its own separate campaign. That's a whole different, separate issue. But as much as you can kind of handle, based on whether you're using bulk sheets or whatever software that you use. Just gives you more control. So I think that's a good piece of advice for brands out there as they think about their ad campaigns of just and as Amazon's going to evolve, things are going to change. But really, the more control you can have over being able to distribute your bids, your ads, your budget all those different things to whatever products that you want, to, the more flexibility and success that you're going to see in the long run in the ad platform. So, elizabeth, anything else that you want to leave listeners with before we wrap up, that you think, as the platform evolves, that you see that they should be paying attention to.

Speaker 2: 44:26

Yeah, no, I think we pretty much covered it. I mean, those are me and my overishing chips is watch your mixed ad spend. Look at things on a pre-listing level. As far as things that should be watched, ongoing, I'm definitely going to say watch those search term reports closely to your point of things, having a little bit less control and things popping up search term reports or wherever you've discovered that.

Speaker 1: 44:51

Yeah, great advice. Well, for people that maybe are out there and they're you know they feel like they're not getting the results that they want. I would encourage them to reach out to you for it. You guys do a free audit for brands.

Speaker 2: 45:07

So all of that, those things I've been talking about. Look on it on a per product level. Do you have mixed ad spend? What does the structure look like? Yeah, all that's in the audit because we want to know. We want to know what we're getting into as much as you do. Perfect.

Speaker 1: 45:22

So for the brands out there that are like, okay, that's all great information, but I just I feel really stuck. You know that's a great opportunity for them. And then for anybody who's listening, where's the best place for them to get kind of the latest and greatest from Elizabeth Green on all the different things that you're finding for Amazon ads?

Speaker 2: 45:42

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, if you're interested in the audit, the website is going to be the best place to go. Junglercom j-u-n-g-l-rcom as far as getting the latest and greatest. Linkedin is definitely where I'm putting out the most content, although I'm trying to ramp it up on YouTube this year. We'll see how I do. I always need to start off with your shrunk, we'll see. But part of that is actually going live every Thursday to answer Amazon ad questions. So far we've been doing that consistently, so that would be another great source of information. If you want to ask a question, I'd like to think I know what I'm talking about. When it comes to ads, we were talking about sources, our good quality sources of information, so feel free to tune in on Thursdays.

Speaker 1: 46:25

Awesome. Well, Lisbeth, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Just happy to have you.

Speaker 2: 46:31

Yeah, no, thanks so much. It's been an honor. I appreciate it.