How to Actually Increase Your Amazon Traffic

Paul Rice, Director of Marketing at eComEngine and Liz Adamson, VP of Advertising at Buy Box Experts, discuss how to increase your Amazon traffic in this educational webinar. They cover topics ranging from driving initial traffic to whether your brand is ready for DSP.

If you've ever asked yourself these questions, watch the webinar to get the answers:

What do I need to do before driving traffic to my Amazon listings?
Do I need paid advertising or can I rely on organic traffic?
Where should I start with Amazon ads?
How much budget should I allocate to Amazon advertising?
When is my brand ready for DSP?

At the end of the webinar, Liz offered a free business analysis with the Buy Box Experts team. You can watch the webinar above or check out the show notes below for the recap.

Webinar Recap

In this educational webinar, Paul Rice, Director of Marketing at eComEngine, and Liz Adamson, VP of Advertising at Buy Box Experts, discuss how to increase your Amazon traffic. While covering topics from finding ways to drive initial traffic to determining whether you’re ready for DSP, they provide actionable steps that can take your brand to the next level. Let’s look at some of the highlights.

When to Start Driving Traffic

You’ve started selling on Amazon, but should you start advertising right away? As Adamson explained, it’s important to have a strong foundation before you take that first step. To assess your retail readiness, the first place to look is your product page.

Adamson warned that you can use advertising to drive “thousands and thousands of people to your page, but if that page isn’t ready for traffic, you’re really just wasting your money.” You should see that product page as your salesperson. Advertising gets potential customers through the door, but it’s your product page’s job to convince them to buy.

Organic Traffic vs. Paid Advertising

As an Amazon seller, you may be wondering if you need to advertise at all. It’s actually a very common question. As Adamson explained, “Over the past few years, Amazon really has become a pay-to-play marketplace… everything above the fold is a paid ad. So the very first thing any customer is going to see are paid advertisement placements.” If you want to be front and center, you’ve got to be investing in advertising.

On top of the added visibility and search, paid advertising also improves organic placement. “The Amazon search engine algorithm is based on historical sales,” Adamson said. It looks at past sales periods and whether specific keywords resulted in sales. “If we can continue to increase those sales through advertising and show Amazon that yes, these keywords are driving sales, that just feeds into that organic algorithm.”

How to Increase Amazon Traffic With Advertising

Once you’ve established retail readiness and your product page includes at least five images, more than 15 product reviews, and incorporates A+ Content (using Storefront helps, too!), it’s time to start targeting the shoppers who are already on Amazon searching to make a purchase, Adamson explained.

To do this, you’ll focus on increasing brand awareness through sponsored display ads. Amazon has worked on this program over the past year to provide excellent targeting options to help sellers develop brand recognition and convert browsers into buyers. While most sellers are aware that sponsored ads allow them to target keywords, they can also use ASIN and category targeting. This casts a wide net to increase both sales and traffic.

How Much to Spend on Amazon Ads

Allocating a budget for advertising can be tough, and every situation will be different. You may be launching a new product or you might have existing products with existing sales. There are a lot of factors to consider. Ultimately, every business is unique and will have to make decisions based on their specific needs.

Amazon sellers will need to evaluate their ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), and Adamson shares guidance based on several different scenarios in the webinar. Overall though, when you don’t have a sales history and you’re just starting out, advertising may make up a significant portion of your budget for those first few months. Additionally, while your total ad spend will decrease once organic sales pick up, your sales budget will always evolve.

Is Your Brand Ready for DSP?

Once you’ve maxed out advertising opportunities, it may be time to start looking at DSP, or Amazon Display Side Platform. The goal of Amazon DSP is to allow “advertisers to efficiently reach Amazon shoppers on Amazon sites, across the web, and in mobile apps.”

“The benefit to using the Amazon platform is you actually have access to Amazon customer data,” said Adamson. This information is normally very closely guarded by Amazon, but DSP participants are provided audiences that they can target. Adamson noted that you will need additional budget allocations to use DSP, but you're spending that budget for growth.

Advertising on Amazon is an investment of time and resources, but it’s an essential part of your business’s growth and success. Listening to the suggestions and case study outlined in this webinar is a great way to get started.

Recommended Resources From This Webinar

Blog post: How Any Brand Can Leverage Amazon DSP Targeting
Guide: Getting Amazon Reviews
Free business analysis with Buy Box Experts

Paul: Thank you all for joining. My name is Paul Rice. I'm head of marketing here at eComEngine. And today we have a topic that all sellers are interested in, and that is how to increase traffic on Amazon. Specifically to your Amazon listings. Something that everyone needs to know more about, no matter how tenured you are as a seller. It's a very important topic and that's why we need a very important expert to tell us about it and to speak with us. And I have none other than Liz Adamson, VP of Advertising at Buy Box Experts. Liz has been a great partner for many years to eComEngine. We've worked with her through her previous company and now at Buy Box Experts. So real quick, a little bit more about Liz, she works at Buy Box Experts as I mentioned. They are a marketing agency for medium to large Amazon sellers.

Paul: And she's leading a team of Amazon PPC and DSP strategists (we'll get into what DSP means) who use a data-driven approach to develop and execute on strategy for Amazon sellers. Since 2011, Liz has worked with Amazon sellers, both large and small from brand new startups to established brands, giving them both strategic guidance and advertising support. So she's definitely the person you want to talk to about driving traffic. She's helped hundreds of brands reach their goals. In 2015, she founded Egility, which you may have heard of. It was an Amazon digital marketing agency that Buy Box Experts acquired last year. Congrats Liz on that. And in addition to her Amazon expertise, Liz has over 15 years of experience in developing marketing and selling consumer goods, as well as her MBA emphasizing marketing and brand management. So Liz, welcome. Thank you for being a guest and please feel free to say hi.

Liz: Yeah. Thank you, Paul. Super excited to be here. eComEngine has been a wonderful partner over the years and I love doing these webinars with you folks.

Paul: Awesome. So real quick, I wanted to cover some of the topics that we'll be speaking about. And we don't have really a strict agenda here, so please stay focused and keep your ears open because we may talk about some of these items at the end of the list first or some of the first ones later and we might not get to them all. We'll see how it goes. So to start, retail readiness, what do you need to do before you start driving traffic? What do you need to know? The difference between organic and paid advertising and why you want to do a paid advertising as opposed to organic all the time. And how you can drive traffic with advertising, how to increase external traffic to Amazon or your Amazon listings. We'll go over a budget in ROAS which everyone should be familiar with.

Paul: And when is a brand ready for DSP? I mentioned, we'll talk about what is DSP and it is kind of a confusing topic. So I'm so glad to speak to Liz about it because I know a little bit about traditional DSPs, but it gets really confusing and I would love to learn a bit more as well. So thank you all for joining and I'm going to go ahead and stop this share so that you can see us. And I'm going to jump into some questions for you, Liz. I mentioned retail readiness. As you're building anything in life, whether it's a house or a business, you've got to have that foundation, that strong foundation. It's paramount. So when it comes to advertising or when it comes to driving traffic on Amazon, what do sellers need to know before they even start? What are the foundational elements?

Liz: Yeah. That's a really good question. A lot of times we get clients coming in and they're so anxious to start advertising because they know that that's just such a huge tool to start driving traffic and build sales and so on and so forth. But you really do need to have that foundational support before you start getting aggressive with ads or sometimes before you even start that first ad. And that's what we call retail readiness. It's making sure you've got that product page ready for that traffic. I tell people over and over again that I can drive thousands and thousands of people to your pages but if that page isn't ready for that traffic we're really just wasting your money. I look at that product page as almost your salesperson. The advertising gets them in through the door. The product page becomes the salesperson and its responsibility is to then convince the customers to buy. And so we look at everything from product images to A+ content, to your reviews, your copy, and so on and so forth to make sure that that page really is ready for increased traffic and ready to make those conversions and turn that ad spend and to ad sales.

Paul: Awesome. Makes sense. And I forgot to mention if anyone has questions during the webinar, please feel free to ask them. We'll try to handle them as we get them. I should have mentioned that earlier. But thank you, Liz. That totally makes sense. So when it comes to advertising and driving traffic with advertising, why? Why use paid advertising? And can sellers just rely on organic? Is there a certain time they should use organic or shouldn't? Help us understand one versus the other.

Liz: Yeah. That's another question I get a lot is, why should I spend money on advertising if I can get free traffic through my organic listings? I even get questions on, "Hey, well let's scale back ads and let's let organic do the heavy lifting." And unfortunately over the past few years, Amazon really has become a pay-to-play marketplace. If you were to go to an amazon.com search results page now, everything above the fold is a paid ad. And so the very first things any customer's going to see as they're searching on Amazon are paid advertising placements. You've got your headline search ad, you've got usually a row, sometimes two rows of sponsor product placements and then your organic placements start. And so if you want to be top and center and an upfront and the first product a client sees or a customer sees when they're searching, you've got to be investing in advertising.

Liz: And the second thing advertising will do in addition to that additional visibility and search is it helps that Amazon flywheel. We know that the Amazon search engine algorithm is based on historical sales. They're looking at different increments of past periods of sales, looking at what are customers actually purchasing when they're searching for specific keywords. And if we can help continue to increase those sales through advertising and show Amazon that yes, these keywords people are buying our product for, that just feeds into that organic algorithm and starts pushing your search ranking up and up and up. And will start to increase that organic placement as well. So it's really this combined hybrid approach. We use advertising to help increase organic sales. And we've seen the worst happen when we shut off ads for whatever reason and we do see that search rank for organic start to plummet because you're not getting the same type of sales volume. Amazon's algorithms are going to start favoring somebody else who is getting that sales volume. And the reality is everyone's using ads now. We're seeing cost per clicks go up as more and more sellers jump into that. And if your competitors are using advertising and you're not, you're just not going to get that kind of sales volume you need to get good organic placement.

Liz: Advertising is such a growing opportunity for both sellers and Amazon has spent billions of dollars in just investing in the platform to make it a good platform. I mentioned just a couple of the ad placements in the search engine results page. You're going to see more and more. We've seen over the past six months, more and more ad placements on the product pages as well.

Liz: And so even after you've gotten that click, maybe through an organic search, after you've gotten that click, they land on your product page, there's now at least three ads above the fold that a competitor could be placing on your page to try to steal that traffic from you and steal that conversion from you. And so we'll talk a little bit more about how we can use some of these ad placements as defensive strategies and so on. We can also use them as what we call a conquesting strategy where we can go and proactively place our ads on other competitor product pages. And so the fact that that average advertising is just everywhere, a search engine results, page product page, it's in the shopping cart, it's in the thank you page, it's in the sidebar. There's ads all over Amazon. And to get ahead of your competitors you've got to be a first mover on a lot of these placements as they start to pop up. And again, going back to the question on organic, the more sales you're generating with ads, the more favorable your organic position will be because you're using the Amazon flywheel effect.

Paul: Right. That makes sense. This whole environment reminds me of Google several years ago when they had no paid ads and then they were on the right side and then they were above your search listings or search results listings. And they're growing by the day. And there's so many more things you can do from advertising. I know we hadn't talked about this before, but do you have any inkling or idea of what the future is for Amazon? Do you think they're going to get pushback from buyers about the amount of ads or is it almost transparent and buyers don't even know that they're ads?

Liz: Many times buyers don't realize it's an ad. The search engine results page, as you look at ... If you don't know what you're looking for, that little tiny caption that says sponsored ... And most people who don't work in advertising aren't going to notice that or see that. Other than that, the placement looks exactly like every other placement. Every other organic placement. And so my thoughts are customers aren't noticing that the way we as marketers might think they are because we're hypervigilant and we're always noticing, oh, this is an ad, and that's an ad. But most people working outside of digital marketing will never notice it's an ad. And as Amazon continues to develop its advertising ... Sponsored brand plus video is a relatively new addition to the advertising family for Amazon. And having a more engaged and interactive ad that catches the attention. And we're seeing huge click-through rates in video ads.

Liz: And that just tells us that customers like the ads. It's catching their attention. It's creating engagement and focus. So I don't see pushback when it comes to ... Especially on platform advertising. It becomes more obvious as an advertisement if you're say, surfing cnn.com and a DSP ad placement is served to you on that webpage. You're like, "Oh, there's an Amazon ad and I'm on CNN." That becomes a little bit more obvious. But again we're still seeing great results with DSP despite that. And unfortunately, in this day and age, I think consumers are getting used to advertising. It's there, it's here to stay. It's in your mobile apps. It's in your search engine results page, whatever browser you're using to search, and it's going to be on marketplaces like Amazon.

Paul: Yeah. If you think back 10 years ago, I think if this environment was present, it would be a visceral reaction, but we've come to accept it. So where does a seller start with advertising?

Liz: Yeah. As we talked about at the beginning, first it's that retail readiness. Is your product page ready and do you have seven to nine images? Do you have more than 15 or 20 reviews? Are they good reviews? A+ content is a must. I also encourage storefront. I love running ads to storefront because it's a great place to pull in the traffic into your catalog and have them start shopping across various parts of your catalog instead of a single product page. So that's really that first step is that retail readiness. That you're ready for the traffic and have some good landing pages that will convert your browsers into buyers. And then we start talking about what's called a full funnel approach. So if you can imagine kind of an upside down triangle where the bottom is customers who are purchasing your items, the middle section is customers who are perhaps browsing in that aisle, thinking about buying. They've seen your brand. They're either considering it ... It's called the consideration stage. And then that very top stage is the awareness stage where someone may just be starting to think about, "Oh, I think I might want to buy this. And now I want to start looking for products that might meet my need." And your job is to make them aware of your brand and your product and that you exist and that you're an option for them.

Liz: And so we typically start at that bottom of that funnel in. And especially with Amazon, because it's such a destination for shoppers. They go to Amazon to buy. They have their Prime membership. They know they're getting their one or two day free shipping. They're there to buy and they're there to shop which is what really makes it such a powerful platform. And so we start with advertising that serve on the Amazon marketplace. And those are the sponsored product ads and sponsored brand ads. We'll start with those to catch those shoppers who are searching to purchase something.

Liz: We see high conversion rates with those. As we begin to max out that opportunity, as we begin to max out keywords and ASINs we can target to try to capture this traffic, we start moving up the funnel to try to increase your size of the pie. So let's say you've got a finite number of people who are aware of you and searching for you, let's make more and more people aware of you so they start coming into Amazon to search for you. And that's where we get into products like sponsored display ads, which I could probably do a whole webinar on that as well. It's a relatively new ad and it's a powerful ad as well.

Liz: I get pushback sometimes when I talk to clients where we want to launch sponsored display. "Oh, we tried that a year ago. It was terrible." Amazon has developed these over last year like crazy and there's some really cool targeting options with sponsored display that we're now strongly encouraging the brands test and try.

Liz: But yeah, to get back to your question, starting with advertising and starting with that low hanging fruit of, we know customers are searching for your brand name, we know customers are searching for running shoes and they're buying running shoes and maybe they're buying green running shoes and so we'll target things like that. And then moving into targeting competitors in DSP ads and trying to make people just aware of your brand and that you exist. Something that not everyone knows is ... Everyone's fairly familiar with the fact that you can target keywords through sponsored advertising. And that's where we usually start is that keyword targeting. But then branching into ASIN targeting, branching into category targeting and casting ... What I call, we cast a wide net. And as we build up that funnel and try to increase that size of the pie so you can increase your sales and traffic and so on.

Paul: Now, you mentioned ASINs, and I believe this is true, but just to clarify for everyone, you're talking about bidding on competitor ASINs and your own ASINs and potentially related ASINs, right? Not just your own, correct?

Liz: Yeah. There's a lot of things you can do with ASINs. And for anyone who may be newer to Amazon, an ASIN is a unique identifier for a specific product page. And we have the opportunity to target these ASINs, and it does a couple things. One, using sponsored display ads, we can actually put that advertisement on a specific product page. Or we can have it show up in a search page alongside that particular product. And there's several strategies we use for ASIN targeting. One, and probably the first strategy you should always employ is targeting ASINs within your own brand. So if you sell several dozen products or a hundred or a thousand products ... Let's say you sell running shoes to go back to that example. Maybe you sell socks as well. Maybe you sell other apparel. Jogging shorts or shirts and other athletic apparel. If someone's visiting your running shoe product page, you can place an ad for your socks or place an ad for your T-shirt or place an ad for another thing that a runner might want to purchase alongside those running shoes.

Liz: And that's, again, a powerful strategy to try to keep them within your catalog to increase that average order value, to expose them to the fact that, "Hey, I'm not just a one product brand. I've got some more products for you to look at." And so that's something every brand should be doing is targeting their own ASINs or their own products so that you're keeping that traffic kind of within your catalog. It also is a defensive move so that a competitor doesn't come take that spot and try to take them out of your brand. Other really cool targeting options you can use that not many people do are what I call complementary products. For example, if you sell crib sheets for a crib, you might want to be placing advertisements for furniture. For nursery furniture, for cribs and maybe rocking chairs, tables. Maybe just other nursery type ... Someone's shopping for these type of items, they're trying to put together a nursery for a brand new baby, they're probably going to want some sheets.

Liz: And so if you put your advertisement for crib sheets on these various products, you can get some traffic there you might not have gotten otherwise. They might not have been thinking about sheets or searched for you in particular, but they saw your ad and now they're going to buy your sheets with the crib they just purchased. So don't forget that opportunity of being able to kind of cross-sell your product across categories.

Liz: And then the last targeting strategy we use when we target ASINs is your competitors. That has a low return, but that's not the goal. The goal when you're targeting competitors isn't necessarily conversion. It's more about awareness. So when we talk about that marketing funnel, this is you going up that funnel up to just ... You're just making people aware that you exist. Studies show that it takes anywhere from seven to 10 ad impressions. A customer needs to see seven to 10 ad impressions before they purchase your product. So even though you don't convert on that necessarily, you've served an impression, they're aware of you, they may come back and search for you later. So targeting competitors. Making sure if you've got that budget to ... It's a little bit of a lower return type of ad spend, but doing that will increase that awareness and kind of start to steal some of that market share away from competitors.

Paul: Makes sense. Traditionally that holds true as well that bidding on competitive terms or competitive names does have a low return. Is there anything else at play there other than the buyer was simply looking for another brand, and that's why there's a low return? Or is there some other mechanism in play to make it more expensive other than that?

Liz: Yeah. That's a good question. It often is if someone has gone on Amazon and they've searched for a specific brand, they have often already made that decision in their head that, oh, I would like to buy Nike, or I would like to buy Reebok, or I would like to buy this brand cause I know it and I've used it. And it can be hard to break that kind of brand loyalty sometimes. And that shouldn't dissuade you. There are some very strong loyal brands you might want to think twice about. Maybe let's not target them. I mean let's maybe targets some other lesser brands that don't have quite the brand loyalty that maybe a Nike does. So you're trying to convince someone to switch from a brand they're already familiar with, which is difficult and can lower those conversion rates. But it still can be an effective strategy because what if they're not finding what they wanted on that Nike page? What if they don't have the right size or the right color?

Liz: What if they searched for Nike but they saw your ad and go, "Gosh, that looks like it would be more comfortable than what I was originally searching for."? So it's not that there's zero chance, but it is definitely a lower chance when you're targeting those. But again, the idea is you're making them aware that you exist and they may not need you today, but they might need you next week or next month. And now that they know that your brand is there and you sell a quality product, they may just come back and search for you instead of the original brand that they were searching for.

Paul: Excellent. Totally makes sense to me. So I know this is ... It can be math-related. Basic math essentially. But I often hear people scared of advertising because they don't know how much to spend, they can see ROAS but they're trying to pull in other costs. Maybe internal costs. Different types of overhead costs. How much of a budget should a seller allocate to advertising and how do they make those decisions?

Liz: Yeah. That is a hard decision sometimes. Especially if you haven't been advertising in the past and you're just not sure where to get started. And it kind of depends based on whether you're launching a new product, whether you have existing products with existing sales. So there's a lot of factors that go into this. There's not one set rule that we would recommend to everybody. But I'll walk through a couple different scenarios. One is you've got an existing product and you've been selling on Amazon for a while and you're wanting to ramp up advertising. I usually check what we call a total ACOS number or your percent of spend as a percentage of your total Amazon sales. So if you're selling $1,000 on Amazon, we're going to recommend that your budget is at least about 10% of that $1,000 that you're selling.

Liz: And if you want to get more aggressive, we'll increase that budget to 20% of total sales. The 20% is definitely a growth budget that will help you grow year over year and increase market share and so on. And 10% is a little bit more conservative. But looking somewhere in that range of 10 to 20% of ad spend of your total sales is a good starting point. You may want to adjust up or down depending on results, depending on other market factors. Product launches, they're going to be more expensive. You don't have any history. You're trying to jumpstart this thing that's called the Amazon algorithm and it's going to be much more expensive to start. We're often looking at almost a 50% ad spend compared to total sales in the first couple months of a product launch. And that's because we're really buying traffic. You have no organic traffic. We're having to buy all of your traffic.

Liz: And so be prepared with that as you're launching products that it costs money to drive that initial traffic and it's going to be a little while before organic sales pick up and start to bring down your total ad spend. And once we feel like we've maxed out ... I might be jumping ahead just a little bit here. But as we max out that pay per click or that sponsored ad spend, at some point you're going to get to the point where you've saturated the market with your ads. And then the next step is to go on to DSP, which is where you start placing advertising off of Amazon. And that's going to need additional budget allocations. But again, you're doing that for growth. You're trying to grow your total pie and get yourself a larger slice of the pie at the same time. And so it's definitely evolving. Your budget's going to be an evolving thing based on your product, based on the product lifecycle and based on where you are in that marketing funnel, if you're ready to target awareness, or if you're still just focusing on targeting those customers who are ready to purchase.

Paul: And what do you recommend for people? How do they keep track of this stuff? Are they just using the campaign manager and maybe extracting data from there and putting in it into spreadsheets or ... How does a seller spend their time wisely managing their budget while also doing what they have to do to produce goods and sell?

Liz: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. Amazon's campaign manager has come a long way. It's definitely better than it has been in the past. They've got a lot more sorting and bulk actions and reporting features and you can download things. One thing it doesn't do well is you can usually only easily pull about 90 days worth of data at a time. And so it can be a little limiting that way. And so I am an advocate of third-party advertising platforms. Those will download your data on a daily basis, if not hour by hour, and will store that data for you almost indefinitely. And you can start to see year over year trends and month over month trends much more easily than you could in the Amazon campaign manager. But looking around for a 3P advertising platform that meets your needs, there are some very complex and robust platforms that you can do amazing things with. Those are the types of platforms we use as an agency. And there are more simple platforms if you're not ready for that type of complexity, that can automate a few more things for you, that can provide some very simple reports to give you high-level data and metrics. But definitely look around for an ad platform that meets your needs to help you keep track of all of this data and your budget and your metrics and so on and so forth.

Paul: Awesome. I know you mentioned ... Well, before I jump into DSP, just want to tell all of our attendees and remind them if you have questions, please ask them. We have Liz. She's an expert. Go ahead and ask her questions and get them answered right now, live. So you mentioned DSP and jumping ahead, but this is a perfect segue to DSP. I think a lot of people had never heard of DSP until maybe the past year or so. I'm familiar with traditional DSPs in traditional marketing but not on the Amazon side. But like I said when we kicked off, I think DSP can be very confusing. Can you help us understand what exactly is ... What does it even stand for, for all our attendees? What is DSP?

Liz: Yeah. DSP, it's this demand side platform that allows you to buy ad inventory across a multitude of placements across tens of thousands of webpages for example. And Amazon's DSP platform, it has been around for a while, but it's getting more and more, I guess, recognition or awareness as agencies like ours are talking about it more and Amazon's been pushing it harder. It's been around for a while and the main difference between say the Amazon DSP platform and another third-party DSP platform, they do basically the same thing. They buy ad inventory and they go to an ad auction and get inventory on tens of thousands of different sites. The benefit to using the Amazon DSP platform is you actually have access to Amazon customer data. Which as everyone who has done anything with Amazon knows, Amazon guards that quite closely and doesn't publish a whole lot. But they're able to do that through the DSP in the way that they provide us audiences that we can target.

Liz: So for example, rather than just being limited to maybe targeting your demographics or targeting geographically or targeting your customer lists or so on and so forth, you can target Amazon customers who have been shopping in the running shoes category. You can target customers who have been shopping in really any type of category. And so you're targeting customers who've shown an intent to purchase and that's going to be a much better return than someone based on some demographics who may or may not be actually actively shopping for running shoes for example. You can even use your own audiences, your email list and things where you can upload that to the Amazon DSP and create a lookalike audience.

Liz: They'll take your email list, they'll match it to ... Many of those people are customers of Amazon. They'll take a look at the data they have on those customers and match them to another 10,000, 20,000 customers who look just like them, who have the same types of shopping patterns, same types of demographics, and other things, and create a lookalike audience. So the whole point of this ... And I could go on and on about all their different targeting, but the beauty of Amazon DSP is you really are using actual shopper data and able to serve your ads to a very highly targeted audience that are more qualified perhaps than some of the other ways you can target using other advertising methods.

Paul: And is DSP available for everybody or not? If not, who gets to use it?

Liz: Yeah. Yeah. There's not a self-serve option in the sense that there is with sponsored products. If you're a seller on Amazon, you can't go sign up for DSP and start advertising yourself. And in part that's because it's a highly, highly complex platform. There's a lot that can go wrong if you don't know what you're doing. It's extremely complex. And that's part of the beauty of it too and the one reason why I love it is because we have so many levers to pull. So while you can't go do that yourself, there's two options for brands. You can have Amazon manage your DSP for you. They have really, really high minimums so there is a much higher bar to entry to have Amazon manage your DSP for you.

Liz: Or you can hire an agency like Buy Box Experts or many other agencies who do have what's called a self-serve seat. And we have access to the DSP platform and can set up those campaigns and optimize and run the metrics and report back to you. Agencies like ours have much lower minimums. Our minimum starts at $10,000 a month in ad spend. $5,000 a month if we're managing other aspects of your Amazon business for you. So you can get started at a much lower cost than you could historically, whereas Amazon has minimums in the $30,000 to $40,000 per month range. And so that is shifting as more and more agencies are out providing DSP services. We're able to give it to you at a lower minimum than historically it's been available.

Paul: Awesome. Quite the benefit there. I do have a couple great questions. From Hal, he asks, "Can you discuss the differences between sponsored display with its improvements and DSP?"

Liz: Yeah. That is a really good question. A lot of people look at them as the same thing. They're actually very different and I'll talk through a couple things here. One is there's kind of two primary things that sponsored display will do. It will allow you to do ASIN targeting and get those placements directly on a product page. So there's a banner that goes right above the title, there's an ad that goes right below that add to cart button, and there's another ad that goes right below the bullets. Those are all sponsored display placements. DSP is eligible for those placements, but quite frankly, we've been told that Amazon prefers to give them to a sponsored display placement. So all things being equal, if a DSP and a sponsor display ad is trying to get that placement, Amazon will give it to a sponsored display.

Liz: And so to summarize that, sponsored display, its strongest benefit is that on page advertising on amazon.com advertising, when the customer's ready to purchase, when they're on that product page, when they're in the search engine results page. There's some placements there as well. The sponsored display is very, very powerful for that on Amazon ready to purchase, they're actively searching for products. DSP, while we can do some on Amazon placements, they're more like the homepage placement and a few other things, but its power is more of that off Amazon marketing. So again, that cnn.com example I gave earlier. If you've got someone who's visited your Amazon page, they've left Amazon, they're now no longer in shopper mode. Now they're back in reading the news or getting the latest sports scores. You can serve them ads wherever they are on the internet and bring them back into Amazon.

Liz: So we can do lookback windows. Anyone who's purchased ... Or sorry, anyone who has looked at your product in the last 14 days and they haven't purchased your product, then we'll go ... I like to say, we'll go chase them with an ad and remind them, "Hey, remember you were looking at me and didn't you want to buy this?" And kind of bring them back to the Amazon platform to complete that purchase. And so that's how I separate the two, is sponsored display is really strong on amazon.com opportunity. Whereas DSP, its opportunity is this unlimited thing we call the world wide web where you can advertise just about anywhere and bring them back to Amazon.

Paul: Awesome. Great explanation there. Now, we are getting a few questions about reviews. I'm going to hold off answering those since we want to keep this webinar strictly about driving traffic to Amazon, but I will address those personally after the webinar. Be assured of that. I have another good question from another Paul. Good to see another Paul. He's speaking about DSP. He says, "DSP sounds like it's very similar to how we target on Facebook. How would you contrast the two in terms of retargeting?" I think you've already covered a little bit of that, but anything else in there as far as relating it to how you can advertise on Facebook?

Liz: Yeah. It's very similar to that where you can retarget visitors, you can create lookalike audiences. And I'm not going to be very fluent in Facebook advertising, but there's a lot of features there that are very similar. DSP, it's much more than what Facebook can do in that it has such a huge reach across the web. And again, you're using that specific Amazon shopper data. And so you're getting that really highly targeted audience. Some of the placements that ... Maybe I'll just talk about this a little bit more, but in addition to ... I've used that cnn.com example where you get that little sidebar ad that is an Amazon ad, brings you back. There's many more places than just that. Using Amazon DSP, you can target the Kindle Fire and you can create a full-screen ad that if anyone uses a Kindle, you usually have an ad that is on the wake up screen.

Liz: And so we can do a wake up screen takeover and target that. That's a really big awareness play. And we see some good kind of down the road returns on that. We see increase in brand searches is what we get from that. Fire TV. Anyone who's using the Fire TV device to stream their video content, there's advertisements that can go there. Amazon DSP allows you to access what's called OTT or over the top advertising. And so if you are watching from a service like Hulu or CBS or other services that have basically commercials in their video streaming or advertising, we can place the advertisements there. And so someone watching their favorite show, all of a sudden your ad pops up. It's a video ad. They can't skip it. If they want to keep watching their TV show, they have to finish the video. So there's a ton of different things you can do beyond what people think of as typical PPC advertising or digital marketing. The power of DSP is we can go where the customer is. If they're watching a video, if they're on their tablet, if they are on an app, there's there's ads that can serve to apps. Or if they're browsing the web. And then down the road, we expect to be able to access Alexa and do voice advertisements as well.

Paul: That'll be fun. That's another one of those things that 10 years ago, I think there would've been a visceral reaction, but couple years from now, you're going to be hearing ads when you ask for a song and it's going to feel normal.

Liz: Yep.

Paul: I've got a great question about budgeting and wanted to jump into that anyway. When is a brand ready to even start with DSP?

Liz: Yeah. That's a good question. There's two things I look for usually. One is how much are you ... Excuse me. How much are you spending on PPC right now? If you're spending between $10,000 and $20,000 a month on PPC, then yes, we should be looking at DSP for you. If you're spending that much money already on marketing, let's get you started with a five or 10K DSP budget and start to grow that to get you more traffic coming in on Amazon. The other thing I look at that's a little bit easier if we've been managing your ads is I had a client ... We work with a lot of clients here at Buy Box Experts and one of the things we watch for as we're managing their PPC advertising is we watch for year over year and month over month growth. And at some point that growth is going to become stagnant.

Liz: We've done it. We've done all the page optimization. We've done storefronts. You've got fantastic reviews. We've gotten amazing sponsored campaigns running across all three sponsored ad types. And once we've maxed out all those opportunities, if we want to continue to grow your business year over year and month over month, we have to start expanding the advertising presence. And so that's that natural next step into DSP. If we've checked all the boxes on your usual Amazon optimization, both in product pages and advertising, and we're still not seeing that growth, then we're going to want to of go look at, okay, how do we get more customers coming into Amazon to purchase and shop for you? So those are the two big things we look at. Product launches are another one that DSP can be appropriate for. You just do need to make sure you've got a sizable budget for it, because you're going to have to spend $5,000 to $10,000 in DSP. You're going to have to spend probably the equivalent in PPC. And so if you've got a large product launch coming up, there are things we can do with DSP to help accelerate that launch, but you do need to have that marketing budget behind it.

Paul: Okay. I agree. So Hal asked another question that's very related. He said, "Can you provide any insight into how one might divide up an ad budget between sponsored product, display, and DSP?"

Liz: Yeah. That's a good question. It's going to be a range. There's definitely a range of how we allocate that budget depending on the client's goals, depending on product maturity. And so, again, there's not going to be a hard and fast number, but I'll give a few ranges. I like to look at ... I'll speak to sponsored alone first because that's just how my reports come in and so that's how I think about it. But the sponsored ads, I look at anywhere between 70 to 80% of your spend on sponsored products. That's kind of the bulk usually of your PPC advertising is the sponsored products. They've got the most placements, they've got the most ad inventory, they're usually right where a customer's searching and shopping. And someone's going to start doing math and tell me it doesn't add up but again, these are just ranges.

Liz: I look at about 10 to 20% should then be going to sponsored brand ads. So we're getting that. And really we're trying to target that top of page placement and search results. That's one of the valuable placements for sponsored brands. And there's some really cool things we can do with sponsored brand ads as well. I didn't talk a ton about the options there, but there's a lot of creative options, lot of options with storefront. And that's one thing you want to do is drive into your storefront with sponsored brand ads. So we like to be semi-aggressive on sponsored brand ads and allocating about 10 to 20% of that budget there. The remaining budget, which again, someone's going to call me out in my math, but again, these are just estimates and ranges, but is somewhere around 10% of your budget should be in sponsored display. It's still a very young ad type. It is growing rapidly.

Liz: It is getting more and more placements. I was checking a couple weeks ago. There were 10 different ad creatives it was showing me in 10 different placements across different product pages. Whereas six months ago, I think there were five. So they've really grown in their ad placements. And I think over time, we're going to see more and more budget going to sponsored display. But right now we're seeing up to about 10% as we experiment with sponsored display. And I'll give just one caveat. The ASIN targeting with sponsored display is definitely very powerful. The category targeting can still be very hit and miss, and that doesn't mean you shouldn't experiment with it. We do that with our clients. We'll experiment with different types of category targeting to see what works and what doesn't, because it will vary across product and category. But that's kind of your budget breakdown for sponsored. And then with DSP, I usually take about anywhere between 50% to 100% of your sponsored product budget and apply it to DSP. So you'll kind of use those ratios as you're planning out your ad budget for both platforms.

Paul: Gotcha. And just to clarify, earlier you mentioned if a brand is already spending, I think you said between 10 or 20 a month that they might be ready for DSP and you would allocate, I think you said five, maybe five or 10. You're trying to say that would be an additional expense to what they're spending already, not cutting into that budget. Correct?

Liz: Yeah. And that's a really good question. We don't do DSP instead of sponsored ads. We do DSP in addition to. And in fact, I will not run DSP for a client if we don't have a solid sponsored ad presence on Amazon. Because the way DSP works is again, you're showing ... And you're charged by impression on DSP, you're charged by CPM. It's a cost per thousand impression model. And so basically once that ad becomes viewable ... And we can set those viewability settings to make sure that it's really viewable or a little bit viewable. But once it becomes viewable, you get charged for the ad and the customer may or may not click on it. There might be absorbed in whatever article they're reading, but they've seen your ad. They've noticed it and they continue reading. And some of the metrics we use for DSP is not necessarily click-through rate on those DSP ads, it's brand searches.

Liz: And so we're measuring, okay, we just served so many impressions of this ad on DSP. Now let's look and see how that correlates with customers who are coming to Amazon and searching for your brand. And we see an uptick. When we start managing DSP ads, we see an uptick in branded searches on amazon.com. And so now they're on Amazon. They've seen your ad five or six times in DSP. They now need their running shoes. They're coming to Amazon. "Oh, I saw this ad for so and so. I'm going to search for that." We need to be ready with a sponsored ad placement. Because again, above the fold search is all sponsored placements right now. And so you have to pair your DSP strategy with a really strong sponsored strategy. So you can capture the search traffic that is a result of DSP ad impressions.

Paul: That's interesting. So those DSP ads are driving a lot of awareness. I wonder if brands also see a bump in Google search traffic, just because they're running Amazon DSP ads and people are looking for-

Liz: That would be really interesting. Yeah. That would be really, really interesting to track. And I haven't gotten into those numbers. Amazon launched a platform called Amazon Attribution about a year ago, I think. And the point of that is to actually help track some of those other traffic sources. So if someone's clicking on your Google ad or someone's clicking on a different ad somewhere else that you're running, maybe a Facebook ad and you bring them into Amazon with those ads, Amazon Attribution is helping track that traffic and those conversions for you.

Paul: Awesome. I know a lot of people hear what you're saying and most of it makes sense. People are learning a lot. But concrete examples. Do you have a good case study or a customer that you guys have helped that you'd love to share?

Liz: Yeah. We started working with ... I kind of lost track of how long they've been with us, but we started working with a large brand that sells hair towels. Their name is Aquis and they sell these great hair towels that help just dry hair more rapidly. We published a case study on them because of the success that we've had managing their account. We started with, again, those foundations. With A+ content, with images, with getting their catalog organized with child and parent variations, making sure there was consistent branding across Amazon that truly represented their brand. And of course, after we got that foundation built, we combined that with PPC advertising and we were targeting very relevant keywords to their product that had high search volumes and got their PPC advertising ramped up and started spending those ad dollars.

Liz: And over time, we saw a 1,000% increase in sales. Really dramatically improved their Amazon presence and their sales and became a great sales channel for them. Just this last year, about six months ago, we got them onto the DSP platform, as we felt like we had matured to the point on Amazon, we were ready to now go off Amazon and bring in additional traffic and they had a great quarter. They hit their year-over-year growth metrics for the quarter. We've got a strong Q1 as well. We've seen great return on that ad spend. DSP could be a little hit and miss on ad spend depending on your targets, but great return on that ad spend. In part, because of the great work that has been done with the retail readiness, with having those product pages ready for traffic and ready to convert. So that's just been a great success ... Excuse me. A great success story that I've really enjoyed working with them. And they've been a great partner with us in letting us just do what we needed to do to increase their traffic and sales.

Paul: Awesome. And if people want to see more about that, do you have the case study on your website?

Liz: I believe we do. Yeah. Colleen looks like she's posting that right now, but there's that case study. You can go and read through some of the things we've done there.

Paul: So check that out and you might even learn about a new product. I don't think I need a hair towel, but I know a lot of people out there might need them. All right. That's awesome.

Paul: So as we're wrapping up, I see a couple other questions that I will post answers to directly afterward. But as we're wrapping up, I did want to tell everyone before you go about a couple of special offers. So as most of you know, that we are in the business of feedback and review management, reputation management, as well as inventory management. We do have a 30 day free trial available, which you don't get unless you use this coupon for our products at eComEngine, which are our main products, FeedbackFive and RestockPro. And there's also a special offer, a free business analysis from Buy Box Experts.

Paul: I don't think a lot of people realize how valuable this is. We'll post the links to this free offer as well in the chat. But man, to have an expert group of, I don't want to say experts again, but of past Amazon sellers or people that have been in the industry for many years, take a look at your business and tell you what can be improved is huge. It's kind of like anything in life. You can do so much more as a team than you can do alone. So please check out that free business analysis. Liz, do you want to say anything else about that free offer?

Liz: It's a great opportunity. We've got some highly skilled consultants who will dive into your business. They'll probably even ask you for some access to your account so they can get all the data firsthand. But yeah, they'll put together a plan for you and a plan for success that will help increase your sales and grow your Amazon business.

Paul: Awesome. And actually, since we still have a little bit of time, we just got a question in from Amy, which I kind of wanted to ask myself. We'll get back to some more about this free offer. Right now you can see Colleen is posting some of the analysis that are available to show what you will get. These are great in-depth case studies and a spreadsheet there that shows you what Buy Box Experts could tell you. But real quick, someone asked a question about how will recent privacy changes impact advertising off Amazon in the future. And I know right now Facebook, Google, Amazon, all these tech companies are really fighting for first-party data, first-party cookies, and third-party cookies might be going away. And iOS 14 is causing a lot of changes out there. What's happening on the Amazon side, Liz, if anything? I know it's early on, but I'm sure changes are coming.

Liz: Yeah. Amazon has not said a whole lot about it so we don't have anything official from them if they are making changes or anything like that. We do know that Amazon is very private about its data, even to its agencies and its sellers and so on and so forth. They guard customer information and customer privacy quite closely. And I think they'll continue to do that as a way, not only to appease people who are asking about it, but that's just been their policy. The customer always comes first with Amazon. They want to keep their customers happy. And so that's something to always watch is what is Amazon doing? What do they need to do to keep their customers happy and shopping on their platform? So I don't see any immediate changes coming through because I know Amazon has already taken it very seriously. It will be interesting to watch as Apple and Google are making these changes when it comes to cookies and things. But right now we're not seeing an impact, but we're continuing to watch it and we'll definitely have strategies prepared if things start to shift. Amazon will be more than prepared as well to make sure that they're reacting appropriately to pressure in the marketplace.

Paul: I agree. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I think the next year ... There's going to be a lot of changes over the next year, for sure.

Paul: Well, Liz, thank you again. Everyone in the chat, you can see those examples of what Buy Box Experts offers as far as a category analysis for you. Those are super valuable. And again, they're totally free if you follow those URLs that are in the chat. We'll also send a follow-up email to all attendees with those links as well in case you stepped away or don't want to click on it right now. But Liz, thank you again. It's always great to talk with you. Any last words before we part?

Liz: No, just thank you for the opportunity. I always appreciate being able to work with the team at eComEngine and appreciate all that they do. And as you can tell, I'm super passionate about advertising. If you have any questions, definitely contact one of our consultants and they'll be happy to answer those for you.

Paul: Awesome. Well, thank you all for attending. Enjoy the rest of your day and good luck with your advertising strategies.