Why Your Amazon Ads Aren't Working (And How to Fix Them)

If you're on Amazon, you're gonna be spending a lot of money on advertising and it's a whole business, it's not a side hustle. And so they mostly spend everything that they make. People who take it as a side hustle don't really make money from Amazon because they don't really rank their products.

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All right folks, welcome back to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. If you're looking for lower ACOS, better PPC, and the strategies of marketing on Amazon and beyond in 2024, this is going to be the episode for you. So I've got someone here today from a place called AdFixr, where we're going to talk about advertising and marketing online, specifically around Amazon and the actionable items of this universe we live in now that has become such a different change since when I started 10 years ago. And I like to, the organic drive to PPC marketing beyond 2015. Has been such a dramatic change in the way the marketplace looks now, and many relationships of organic and PPC have changed dramatically. And so it's becoming a market in which you really need to be good at the marketing now. It used to be that you could be sort of average at it, but now we need to be better. And so the guest I've got today here is going to talk about how to get better. So buckle up for the next 20, 25 minutes, and let's go into some questions and answers here that talk about specifically PPC marketing and how to get more out of your ads and traffic and maybe lower your ACOS and increase your TAACOS. So guys, Welcome, Adrian, to the call. It's good to have you, buddy.

Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me. So yeah, let's dive in.

All right, let's get into it. So what, let's talk about pros and cons for the year 2024. Maybe what are you bullish on? What are you concerned about? What should somebody know right out of the gate that you should bring to their attention about marketing and PPC this 2024?

Okay, so everything is kind of evolving and everything is changing, but one thing that always stays the same is that you have to have a strategy for your advertising. You can't just run up some keywords, put them in a campaign and expect something to happen. I think the most important part that never changes is that. So in my experience, it's better to create campaign funnels than just create single campaigns.

Okay.

And yeah, going from there, going to the historical data, leave your campaigns running. That's some stuff that's always been like this, but I think in year 2024, the bids are Really high. So if you're looking to dive into a new market, if you have new products, it's gonna be harder. So you have higher bids, you need to know how to optimize them.

Yeah.

And for 2024, it's really expensive to use PPC, but in Amazon's ecosystem, you can't really excel without PPC. So all the things you do go with the PPC if you wanna succeed in selling on Amazon.

Yeah, so let's talk about that strategy for a second and break it down for me. When you say a funnel within your PPC, what do you define that as for somebody who's listening to this?

So it's basically in our practice, we use 4 campaigns, but it can be a lot more. The first 2 are for research. So if you're starting out product or if you're launching a new product, you have to look into all of the search terms that you can rank on. So first thing you need to do is create those campaigns, one automatic campaign and one manual campaign with keywords that you think are gonna be working for you on broad, let's say, or phrase.

Yeah, yeah.

And from there on, you have search terms for those keywords that are working. You move them up in the next parts of the funnel, which is if you have a search term, let's say if you're selling water and you have a keyword water, the search term is gonna be what people type for, the people find you on. So they can find you on water bottle 1 liter, and if that's working for you, you move that up as exact in the next part of the funnel. And that way you have all the search terms that are working as keywords in the next parts of the funnel. So that way they have enough budget and you allocate most of your budget to the keywords that are working.

Yeah.

And when you find those keywords, when you get to that part of the funnel, it's gonna be making money. who is going to be ranking you on those keywords. So you need to test a lot of keywords out before you create these types of campaigns with exact matches for those keywords because it can be some keywords that you don't really expect, but you're ranking super fast on them and it works great for you. And a keyword doesn't need to have the highest search volume to work for you. Okay.

So, and you mean it doesn't have to have like a huge amount of, like everybody wants to tackle the largest amount of volume keywords because that's the biggest bucks you're banging, but you're Actually saying is it may be better in some instances where you have a longer keyword to target with your campaigns. Is that what you're saying? Correct? If I hear you correctly?

Yes. Yes. If you have longer, uh, long tail keywords that are working for you, you need to test everything out because you can't leave out the ones with the highest search volume because that way you won't rank for them. But you can also have revenue streams for other campaigns, other keywords. I'm sorry.

Yeah.

That are more long tail, but they're working for you. I mean, you have to test everything out. You can't really make assumptions based on what you think is happening. You need to go into the historical data for the campaigns.

In other words, you can't guess.

Yeah, you can't really guess. We had some scenarios where we think something, some keyword is not going to be selling and that keyword ends up the breadwinner. So you need to test everything out. It's just the way it is.

Now, what tools do you prefer to use or methodologies to determine what those keywords are in your world? How do you identify them?

Okay, so when you have a brand in Amazon, you can always go into the brand analytics. And from there on, you can look at real data about the search volume of the keywords that you think you're going to be targeting. Well, so there you can see all the search volume for those keywords. Other thing is you can go in the Amazon directly and look at the recommendations, check out those recommendations in the Brand Analytics tool. I mean, there are also other tools that can help you with that if you're a beginner seller. Helium 10 has some pretty cool tools that you can use. It really depends on what's more user-friendly to you. Basically, they all do the same thing.

Yeah. So in your experience, what, well, what is your experience? Let's get into that real quick. Like, have you been doing this for a little while, a long time? Are you an old goat? Do you do your own sales and own PPC and stuff as well?

Okay. So I started out 5 years ago. So I didn't have anything to do with e-commerce before that. And my partner, Christo, who we started this thing together, came up to me and said, let's go on Shopify, let's start some dropshipping. From there on, we moved our products to Amazon, and after quite a while, like one year after that, we created an Amazon agency to help other people sell because we sold well, we looked into a lot of things, we got into a lot of problems and resolved them. So that's where we created our agency. And 2 years after the creation of the agency, we started trading our application. So, uh, yeah, that's— I, I have helped people sell in a lot of different categories in a lot of different markets, mainly in the US market, in the Europe markets, in Germany and in UK mainly.

Okay, Germany, UK mainly. Okay, and how do you see those marketplaces playing differently than, say, the dot-com market or other markets right now?

Okay, so the dot-com market is— everyone knows it's the biggest market, but it has a higher barrier of entry, so It's quite harder to start selling on the .com as opposed to selling on the Germany market. The bids are really higher. If some bid is going to be €1 in Germany, in the US it's gonna be like $3, $4, $5, it depends. So it has a higher barrier of entry, but if you succeed on selling on .com, you're gonna succeed everywhere and you're gonna make a lot more money.

Yeah, yeah, that's been my impression as well. It's good to have them as secondary markets. but its primary market, the .com, really proves in volume quickly whether or not that brand is kind of worth going into the place. But of course, the psychology of buyer, every marketplace is going to be different from Europe to Japan, etc. And not all brands or all products will obviously move laterally as expected to the same degree. PPC won't move laterally.

But yeah. If you have a product that's selling well in Germany, that doesn't mean it's going to be selling well in .com. And the opposite thing, if you have a product from .com, doesn't mean it's going to be selling on .de. It's really a psychological thing because some products work only in Germany. They're not gonna be selling even in other European markets. Yeah, it all comes down to the research before launching a product.

Roughly how many clients are you guys working with now?

Okay, so for the agency, it's— we have 5 clients because we try to be as dedicated as we can. And for now, onboarding more clients is gonna mean that we need more people, and we're in the process of doing that. But right now we can't really onboard in this month, let's say, more clients. For the PPC software, we have around 100 clients right now.

And what is that software doing then?

So it optimizes campaigns, it creates and optimizes them on a daily basis. So it does all, everything, it's a full automation tool.

So in full automation, is that, I mean, you're, I'm gonna use a coined phrase because everybody says AI, but does it really have AI-driven kind of things in it? Is it predominantly rules-based in its nature? Does it learn and change and adapt?

Okay, so I think the AI mania got to everyone and even people that aren't AI are saying that they are AI.

And that's my point. I think it's happening a lot.

Yes. Yeah. So we have parts that are machine learning AI, and we have parts that are behavioral-based AI. So it's kind of a mix of both, but it's not full-on machine learning. We have some behavioral-based AI rules there.

And that's probably the smartest way to do it, unless you have a really large model in place yet. You still kind of still need quite a bit of data, right, in order for that to truly—

Yeah, you need to have a lot, a lot of data. And I don't really know if in legal terms, is it okay to train your model on people's data about They're, you know, they give you access when you have a tool, but I don't know in legal terms, how is it? Is it okay to do that?

I don't know, go ask ChatGPT.

It might be able to tell you the answer to that question.

No, I mean, I guess if you're using it in the best interest of their account from their data to manage their PPC in a one-line fashion, then as long as they know that's what you're doing, that's one thing. Otherwise you would obviously, and again, I play no legal guy on the internet, but have had terms of services as well. as a software company in the past, and we've— and we disclosed all of the relationships of the data to the client at time of, uh, you know, signup. So then it's of course their obligation to read the terms of service, but not everybody does that, do they?

Yeah, you can go into the terms of service and write something. I don't know, you can write almost anything and nobody's gonna look into that, to be honest.

Well, there's precedences, I'm sure, for that in legal too, even though I'm not a lawyer. But okay, so you've got that system, you've got your processes in place, and where are you located at by chance? And where are you in the world?

Yeah, so we're in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Sofia, Bulgaria.

Okay.

Is that where you're originally from? Is that where you pulled the business in? Is that where you started at or is that where you moved to or?

Yeah, so we were all born here and we started the business here. We have plans on moving to other countries, but I think that's more in the future.

Yeah. Now, did your co-founder or founder in the company?

Okay, so I'm co-founder. We started this with my partner, Christo, and one more partner, Nikolai, but he's Kind of under the radar. He doesn't really like to show himself. He's very shy.

Is he the data scientist engineer guy behind the scenes, or is it—

He's the CTO.

Yeah, he's the technical guy.

He's the world coder.

Were you the coder too, or were you a programmer, or were you on the business side, or—

I'm mostly at the business side right now. I started with the idea and the algorithms behind it, but as things started to progress, we needed more help, so we hired an outsourcing firm that also became our partner. It's very famous here in Bulgaria, also in the UK market. Yeah.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Very cool.

And you guys kind of built up a fairly big team for a startup.

Yeah, no, you guys are pushing along pretty hard, which I appreciate. What are you— are you bullish on the Amazon market? There's a lot of changes lately. We talk about this quite often and I was interested in your opinion, but do you feel the changes and the adaptations Amazon's making to the fees and services and policies and even the coming Cosmo updates and stuff? What do you feel about all those changes?

I feel that the person who is selling on Amazon has to be always looking for new things, maybe going to Amazon conferences, going into certain groups. There are a lot of groups about sellers that help each other. They have a kind of— they have a barrier of entry too, so you have to make certain amounts of money to be in those groups, but we get our information from newsletters, from those kind of groups, because even if you're looking into Amazon directly, you can't really know everything all the time. You can miss some things. Even right now, if Amazon removes your variations and you try to make your products into a variation, you're gonna be suspended. That's a thing that we know from Amazon communities, from people who have experienced that, and it's happening to a lot of people right now. So, you know, that kind of information, you have to be always looking for it. There are also with the higher fees, with the new FBA changes, you have to look into everything, and I think Selling on Amazon is becoming harder and harder because if you look at selling on Amazon a few years back, it was a lot easier. The PPC was cheaper, you had less competition. Now it's harder year by year, but I think if you're up to date with everything, you look into the new stuff, you're gonna be okay.

Yeah, if we can ask that question from your experience, I've heard the same scuttlebutt about the variation problem, and one of the things I noticed about that was a common theme of people using AI to sort of duplicate the variations with images, but not actually showing that there's a true product duplication. What are you seeing in that variation issue? Because it's pretty relevant and pretty recent, actually.

Okay, so the— I haven't really gotten into why it happens to people, but I think that if you have a real variation of something and not trying different tactics to boost your product, you're not gonna have a problem. But a lot of people are trying a lot of different things and it's kind of playing with Amazon's policies. So even now, if you make, let's say, 10 ASINs in the same product and you differentiate it by a little bit, it's still on the edge of their policy. So maybe you're gonna have a problem, maybe you're not gonna have a problem. If you go always by the rules, you're of course not gonna get the problem with especially the variations.

Yeah, so the shortcuts are kind of coming to an end. I mean, we've done this long enough that so many people have been taking shortcuts and Amazon has kind of turned a blind eye. In some instances you're like, well, why are they picking on that thing that wasn't such a big deal? And they're leaving all these other people doing this stuff with breaking the terms of service. But it seems like they're making a concerted effort to really clean it up and force the changes in the seller marketplace by fees. They're forcing the changes through AI and image and graphic changes, of course, to variations. If you just created an image graphic variation and didn't really show segmentation or differentiation, You're getting caught. So in other words, there's a lot of these—

am I wrong?

Because it seems to me that it is just cleaning up a lot of this nonsense that people have been getting away with for years now.

Yeah, but a lot of agencies have been using those, let's say, hacks for easier boosts. So I think almost every person that can get away with something will do it if it's technically by the rules.

Yeah.

Yeah, a lot of people have been doing variations that aren't really variations so they can boost up their rank altogether.

Correct. Or jacking the variations to keep the reviews flowing for products that weren't exactly the same. Yeah, listings for the review process, that's been what I've seen.

Yeah, going on Vine, taking 10 products, combining it to variation that shares the reviews, then you go into advertising only one product, that one product brings the whole variation up there.

That's the thing that people have always been doing this, but I think now it's going to be harder In other words, you have to build the business professionally and you have to do it within the TOS and actually build an e-commerce company, not a, what we call in our world, a side hustle or hobby business that has growth hacks as the primary way you're gonna make the money work.

That's right.

You have to build something stable. If you're on Amazon, you're gonna be spending a lot of money on advertising and it's a whole business. It's not a side hustle. And people who take it as a side hustle don't really make money from Amazon because They don't really rank their products, so they mostly spend everything that they make. Some of them are even at a huge loss. Yeah, you have to take it seriously.

Yep, I agree 100%. Well, very well said. Is there anything I didn't ask during this time so far that I should have brought up or asked during our conversation?

No, I might add something that it's really been going on lately is that Amazon kind of goes into a verification process, so a lot of people might be having verification issues.

Yeah.

And we've seen it happening a lot lately. So for the people that have verification issues, don't think something is gonna happen. It just randomly pops up from Amazon. So they, at a certain time frame, they go in and check a batch of accounts. So let's say they have to do this and they check a bunch of accounts and they're gonna be asking for some information, some documents.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's something that's going on lately.

Correct. Yeah, very well.

It's happening to a lot of people.

Definitely. Thank you for bringing that up because it is something that has got a couple of our clients messed up at this moment. Even though they did everything right, the verification engine didn't validate what they did and they're having to go back and get it fixed as fast as they can. So more trouble with growth capacity and using AI to solve human problems. And it doesn't always, it's not always perfect. Sometimes it makes no sense why certain things happen.

I think it's far from perfect. And you really, yeah, you need to check everything because even let's say adopt. Or a space can make Amazon reject your product or sorry, documents.

Yes, absolutely. Just gotta cross the T's and dot the I's as best as you possibly can from the very beginning. Well said. So if it was in my power, and I'm gonna say in all time and space, to invite you to sit down with somebody I know that I could introduce you to, have a conversation, talk about something you're fascinated, it could be anybody, who would it be? Is there anybody that comes to mind?

I don't know, you caught me off guard with that question. Yeah. Some, somebody who is interesting and you can talk to?

Yeah. Anyone you could talk to.

Yep.

Somebody you want to, whose brain you want to pick, sit down. You've always been interested to talk to them.

Okay. I think what all of the people that have been on your podcast related to Amazon are going to be saying is Jeff Bezos. You think Bezos?

Actually, no one has said Jeff Bezos yet. Congratulations. You're the first.

Yeah. Bring him in. Ask him why is he making this? Why is he terrorizing us with constant verification?

So you want to put him under the firing squad? Well, I don't know if we can do that, but We can be six degrees of separation. I always joke about that at the end of the call because that's possible. Someone in my network could reach Jeff. You never know. So guys, do your job. Internet, go below, tag, comment, like, engage. Help us beat big tech. Put Jeff Bezos on us. Maybe you never know. We might get him to connected with you, Adrian. Never say never, right, bud? All right, man. Thank you for coming on that show. I appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

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