Selling on Amazon in 2020 (E134)

Carolyn Lowe
Co-Founder of ROI Swift
Show Notes:
CPC Sponsored Product
Sponsored Brands
Product Display Advertising

Sponsored Brand Video Make sure you have text over

Retargeting Not as effective
Good for less than $100 AOV
$400 AOV
Retargeted on Amazon properties

69% of Amazon Searches are non-brand
70% of Amazon Users don’t make it past page 1
Start with auto campaign
ASIN Product Targeting Find all products with a higher price and lower stars

Used to have a 35k Min ad spend Use Certified Agency Partners

Agencies have access to betas
SnapChat – Low CPC in 2020
TicTac – Testing now
Sponsors:
Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!
Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation
Bio:
Carolyn is the co-founded ROI Swift an agency that she started in 2015 which helps consumer
brands with Amazon, Paid Ads for Facebook/Instagram, and
Paid Search.
Links:
https://roiswift.com
Transcript :
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce. I talk with Carolyn Lowe about selling on Amazon in 2020. This is a business we commerce episode one 34.
Charles (00:18):
Welcome to the Business eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I’m your host, Charles pesky. Now I’m going to tell you what’s Carolyn Lowe. Carolyn is a cofounder of ROI Swift and agency that she sided into 2015 to help consumer brands with Amazon paid Facebook and Instagram ads and paid search as Carolina show today to talk about as a retailer, what you should know, selling an Amazon in 2020. So Hey Carolyn, how are you doing today? Great. How are you Charles? Great to have you on the show and yeah, I’m doing well. I here in the COVID world, I saw, I normally have to watch on video. I normally shave every morning and my dollar shave club razor broken half this morning. So waiting for a new one. So if you’re watching on YouTube and you wondering why I have a bed, that’s why, so we’ll see how fast dollar shave club ships. That’s all I’m doing. So how about yourself?
Carolyn (01:11):
I’m doing well. It’s just hot, hot and humid in Austin, Texas. It’s pretty much summer here, so I’m happy to be inside.
Charles (01:18):
Nice. We’re just talking like the razor because I can’t run out and just buy a razor, this COVID world. We were talking before the show about Amazon and just some of the changes that have been affected recently. Shipping times, logistics I’ve have a few guests on and just going to talk about recently, it feels like 2012. Like the entire world is like shifted and the way I’m seeing it is this could be not a temporary thing. This could be the new norm. I think there’s a lot of retailers now we work with have that. Let’s talk with someone the other day and they’re like, yeah, we’re doing black Friday numbers. I’m like, Oh, that’s great. They’re like, yeah. Every day though, like every single day is like basically black Friday. And I think for certain folks, this is a new norm. And we’ve been talking about, you kinda mentioned Amazon has some big weaknesses that have been shown right in the past three, four months at this point. So could you kind of talk about those?
Carolyn (02:17):
Yeah, I think there’s a few things. So Amazon’s competitive advantage was always that they could get it there faster and cheaper than, than retail. Right? So you would get, when I had young kids, I had a subscribe and save subscription for diapers and I wouldn’t have to run out to target and go get diapers every month diapers would appear and I wouldn’t have to go pack up my kid and go get them. And now, as you’ve seen, you know, target Walmart, they have curbside, they have online shopping, they have much faster delivery and they’re finally taking advantage of their competitive advantage, which is they have all that inventory within five miles of you. So Amazon is opening a lot more fulfillment centers. They’ve gone to one day, one day for a bunch of customers. So if you’re a seller on Amazon and you have enough inventory, you can actually, your products are one day or same day eligible.
Carolyn (03:08):
This was of course pre COVID, obviously prioritizing certain products now, but and the other big thing is in grocery. So Amazon actually lowered fees last the last couple of years in grocery down to 8%, from 15% to try and capture more of those folks because you can’t be profitable, right. Selling a jar of peanut butter online and paying 15% to Amazon plus shipping fees. So they’re getting, I think much better about about trying to take what used to be their competitive advantage and find a way to win again against retail. You know, I think Charles, like, I think you’ve probably seen the news about Walmart and Shopify as well, right?
Charles (03:51):
Yeah. It’s definitely a Shopify from the big hat literally pops up every day now on the massive growth as well in this stock and just kind of how everything shifted there. Yeah.
Carolyn (04:01):
Yes. And I would say, you know, 90% of our eCommerce clients are on Shopify. If someone comes to us on big commerce or Magento, we sort of we’ll work with them, but it’s definitely 10 times harder than on Shopify. So I think Walmart has gotten real smart about about what’s going on and bringing those smaller retailers to Walmart that don’t want to give up their sales and give up the customer to Amazon. I mean, obviously that’s the downside of Amazon is Amazon owns the customer. You don’t own the customer as a small brand. And so that’s what, you know, Amazon is like the devil you devil you have to deal with sometimes if you’re a consumer brand and you’re sold in retail for these smaller emerging brands on Shopify, I think the Walmart Shopify partnership is very interesting where it gives them a platform, but they can still own the own the customer.
Charles (04:51):
So actually when I talk a bit about that partnership, because I I saw briefly, but do you know the, kind of the details on how that works?
Carolyn (04:58):
Yeah. It sort of at a high level where they’re allowing Shopify folks onto their Walmart platform. So Walmart and target, you know, it’s always been interesting to me that they allow that they’ve started to allow third party sellers. So target allows advertising. So you can run advertising on target and not be sold in target. So I always thought that was strange that you’re on target and they would let somebody else advertise a competing product. But you know, when you look at the advertising market Amazon is now surpassed Microsoft Microsoft’s being platform. Amazon recently did 4 billion in advertising. So that’s, that’s like another whole company just in Amazon advertising. And I think that the Walmart Shopify will be very similar, rare Shopify merchants can advertise on Walmart and they’ll pay a referral fee.
Charles (05:52):
Gotcha. Yeah. And the benefit of you’re doing that, you’re growing your brand because so right now people don’t know each other with Amazon and not everyone kind of does this little sneaky thing on here. Like put something in the box of like, Hey, this is actually like XYZ seller, not supposed to do that. You could probably get blacklisted for that. But also the email address you don’t capture like, like everything is kind of Amazon’s property and you’re just, you’re really there as a retailer to fulfill the order. But with Walmart, they’re giving, they’re giving you the full customer details and then you can market to our customer again, upsell later on like a post purchase sort of thing. So you have access to all of that now.
Carolyn (06:32):
Exactly. And I think it’s a great market for them because you know, this as a software guru is that once you just took that up, I mean, in my Dell days, I had to deal with retail link with, with Sam’s club. And that was like a complete and total nightmare. But I mean, you know, they’ve picked, they’ve picked a winning eCommerce platform. And so, you know, basically any Shopify person and, and making it simple for those Shopify businesses to get out there on Walmart and Walmart’s were realizing, Hey, you know, we don’t want to take all this inventory and we don’t want to hold all this inventory sort of like Amazon think about like the Costco model too, right? I’ve worked with Costco from my Dell days and, you know, they make all their money on membership fees. So I think Walmart will be the same. Hey, we don’t have to carry all this inventory. We don’t have to hold it. We can just make referral fees for people to list on our platform. And I think, I think it’s a smart move on, on Walmart’s part
Charles (07:28):
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Charles (08:16):
Now onto the show. Yeah, we’ll choose your type business model. Right? Cause now right now Walmart has to directly negotiate with custom buyers, get the cheap product cheapest they can, and it’s on them, right? To always be pushing, pushing, pushing back. Now they don’t really cause they kind of saw what Amazon did. They don’t have to, the retailers will basically compete against one another. And Amazon and Walmart gets to just list it. They get their cut. So even if you’re a retailer and you’re selling at a loss, they still do well. So it kind of gives you that, but if they’re giving you the customer at checkout, that allows you either, if you’re selling very, very small margins, you could still have that customer and look at their total, like lifespan of them sell them a product, you know, next month remarket to them, that sort of thing. So you have access to all that now. So you can actually, as a retailer, it’s still make money even with those tight margins, which is pretty neat.
Carolyn (09:14):
Yes, exactly. And you don’t have to go spend on paid search and paid social, although that’s our business. You don’t have to go spend on paid search and paid social to go get those folks to come to your site. They’re already on Walmart. So you can, again, Amazon has 3 million shoppers you know, Walmart, I don’t know the exact number of their.com shoppers, but it’s a lot bigger than, you know, your own Shopify site.
Charles (09:41):
Yeah. Well, that’s always the benefit, right? If you’re selling your own little.com, your Shopify big commerce, and you’re trying to just get, you know, attract people, you can go to someone and get ads, but it’s just, it’s an uphill battle, right? And at first, if you don’t have any sort of big ad budget, you’re just cluttering for each customer. Verse, you go on Amazon, Walmart, you just list a product. If you’re a competitive price wise and you have, okay, write-ins, you’re going to get sales just like automatic you’ll stack, moving product. And the neat part about that is it allows you to, well first just move some product through. But the benefit of doing that is you can then go back to your suppliers and say, Hey, we’re actually, you know, buying X amount per month from you. And then next month it’s double batch.
Charles (10:25):
You could start moving some numbers and then you have some negotiating power because at first, when you’re selling, you know, your handful of orders, you really can’t go to suppliers and push back. But the nice part of the marketplace is, is it’s not just, Hey, you get this tiny little margin, but it makes you actually a lot more profitable on your main channel, which I’ve always found that trick kinda once people realize Ash like, okay, you can sell, raise it, the margins over there, but it makes you more profitable all around, which is pretty useful.
Carolyn (10:53):
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that that’s also a really smart and it’s also less risk for, for brands because it’s really only you’re paying when you make a sale, right? So you’re paying that commission on sales. You’re not paying it on advertising or because I’ve done that with some of our brands we’ve worked with in the past. So target uses Critio. They were using Credio for third party advertising. And so you could sign up with Critio and basically run ads to show up higher on target. And we tested it and spent a bunch of money and it wasn’t, it wasn’t that great. So I don’t love third-party advertising. That’s just her impressions that isn’t per sale. I don’t love, you know, I don’t love the platforms for certain of these that don’t do as good of a job on you know, cost per impressions. And that’s why on Amazon, we really prefer the sponsored products where you’re paying cost per click versus some of other advertising on Amazon, which is on Amazon and off Amazon, which is much more traditional display. And doesn’t perform as well as the cost per click on Amazon advertise.
Charles (12:03):
So it’s only the, on Amazon, it’s only sponsored products at a CPC
Carolyn (12:08):
Sponsored products, sponsored brands. So that, that one that you see at the top, that’s got three normally it’s like three products at the top sponsored brands, or you’ll see that at the bottom as well. So those and product display ads. So if you go to a product page for, you know that great tee shirt you’re wearing and you see an ad for somebody else’s red, t-shirt that’s product display advertising. So those three are all costs per cost per click. And then some of the ones that are like Amazon retargeting, where Amazon does retargeting off of Amazon for you across the web. Some of those are, you know, they get less and less effective once you leave the platform. So the most we’ve seen the most effective ROI is all those sponsored products, sponsored brands and product display ads even sponsored brand video is doing really well for a lot of our clients where you’re going through the search results. And there’s a video ad rather than just a static product ad. Those are doing really well for, for our clients. And then off Amazon, we see that the return on ad spend goes down significantly once it’s, you know, even retargeting doesn’t do as well off Amazon.
Charles (13:21):
Really. So the retail I’m always surprised. I’m surprised to hear you say that because you always have retargeting is like, just do it. It’s always, always profitable, just do retargeting, but you haven’t found that with Amazon retargeting,
Carolyn (13:32):
You haven’t found it to be as effective. The interesting thing is that it really depends on the price point. We see this on Shopify sites too, on, on our paid search and paid social products with less than a hundred dollars AOV have obviously a much quicker time to purchase. So like one of our clients has a $40 AOV and 85% of their people purchase within 24 hours or not at all. So that’s where, you know, we’ll have a retargeting strategy where we’ll only retarget for a day or two, right? Someone that we worked with that has a $400 AOV, we’ll follow them around for 30 days because you don’t tend to drop $400 on a pair of boots, you know, that day. So you want to think about it. You want to look, looks more. The interesting thing about Amazon is 69% of the searches on Amazon are non-brand.
Carolyn (14:25):
So they’re not looking for, you know, Brooks running shoes, you know, most of the time maybe they are looking for you know, I just bought a ring light on Amazon because of all these working from home and my light is lousy at home. And so I was searching for ring light and I wasn’t searching for a brand name. So I think that that’s really interesting that, you know, you can capture a lot of that, but we’ve seen, yeah, retargeting works on Amazon, but it doesn’t work as well as say, if you’re on your Shopify site and you do retargeting on like Facebook or Instagram that tend to have a better return on ad spend than Amazon retargeting.
Charles (15:06):
Is it, is it just the way Amazon’s actually running the retargeting? Like how, like where, what channels they actually retargeting on when they run Amazon retargeting? Like, what is it, what does it get displayed?
Carolyn (15:17):
So that’s a great question. It gets displayed. It depends on the type of one you’re doing, but it, you can, you can get retargeted on Amazon properties. So Amazon prime video, Amazon Kindles, Amazon fires, all of those. You can also get retargeted on Google. So you’re paying a bit of a, excuse me, bit of a markup.
Charles (15:38):
Okay. I see. So they’re so they’re marketing. So they just basically buying ad words at that point and retargeting you there and charging you a little bit extra and you probably lose a little control. I’m guessing when you do it that way
Carolyn (15:50):
You do, and you don’t have a lot of insights. So do do yourself a favor, go look at something on Amazon, don’t buy it and then go to a bunch of websites. And you’ll see Amazon ads that have you know, the product, the number of the stars and the and the price.
Charles (16:09):
Okay. So I’ve seen actually Amazon also run their own retargeting. So you go, and this morning I bought my son a pencil sharpener. And then, you know, if I hadn’t purchased this, those pencil sharpener ads for different pencils, sharp, ms. Will be following me around for the next month basically. And I’ve seen, I’ve seen them do both right where the ad for the one you were looking at follows you around, but then also just a generic pencil, Shatner ad follows you around. And I think that one Amazon is running to try to just pull you back in or the brand can run that direct one to write to you, right?
Carolyn (16:44):
Yes. And occasionally they’ll also do email retargeting. So, you know, the item you looked at, plus five similar items.
Charles (16:51):
Yep. Okay. Interesting. So you’re saying sponsored products, Boston brand. So basically at that point, your Amazon is very intent based, right? Like you’re going on? I was literally sitting with my son. He was trying to write a picture on his same dad that is, you know, for, and he said, dad, the pencil, the pencil is at work it’s to Dell. Some say, Oh, let’s just buy a pencil Shatner. And within like a minute basis per state, it was a very, very small transaction. Right. Like under $10. So you’re using those because it sounds like those are the most like intent-based right. So when you go and type in pencil Shatner, you basically just pulling up, right. The very top of that. And you want to be that first link to someone clicks on under 10 bucks, check out. Yeah, sure. Four-Star at four and a half stars. Great. Let’s go. Is that kind of the model?
Carolyn (17:39):
Yes. So sponsored products, like I said, 69% of those are non branded search. The other stat that Amazon has shared with me with our folks in Seattle. So have some account managers in Seattle because of the size of some of our clients is that 70% of people don’t make it past page one. So it’s this vicious cycle of you need to be on page one to be seen seven, you know, or else you’re only going to be seen a third of the time or 30% of the time, but to be on page one, you need to have good velocity and you need to be relevant to that search term. So you never want to buy a pencil sharpener if you’re a pencil case because you know, they’re not going to buy that. So Amazon’s algorithm for who shows up on the page is largely dependent on the relevancy of the search that, you know, and then your conversion rate really matters, right?
Carolyn (18:27):
Because Amazon doesn’t want to show products of conversion rates of 10%. Right? So we, our benchmark is usually like, if your conversion rates below 20%, we’ll go figure out why is it your product listing? Is it your advertising? Like you’re sending bad traffic to your listing page and that’s why they’re not converting. And, and so really if you want to show up on page one and you’re relatively new, you need to do a lot on the organic side, but there’s only so far organic can take you. So for the most part, you do have to pay to play, to get on page one for Amazon, until you build up enough velocity that you start ranking organically.
Charles (19:05):
Okay. What I’ve kind of found at smaller brands, curious, any thoughts on this? And you see this all the time, they’ll start off. They want to advertise on Amazon. They have a small budget, small ad budget kind of going in. They want to try something. A lot of folks want to see something work, right. And they say, Hey, if it works, I’ll double down, triple down, that sort of thing. But they kind of start by going first, a small budget and kind of wide. And it never really gets like the, the engine never really starts pumping. Right. It kind of just like Peters a little bit. And then they say, Hey, I got a couple of clicks. Like never really going to have data. And they just kind of say scrap it let’s just go back to organic or whatever they were doing before. I’ve seen a few successful retailers where they kind of start off and just go straight in and say, Hey, we’re going, we sell pencil sharpener. We’re just focusing all our dollars on that one keyword term, or just going like a, like a lightning bolt, right. To that. And just focusing on that is that like the strategy you seen work or what you usually see when people are starting off, what do you recommend? They focus or try different things. So what do you kind of say to that?
Carolyn (20:12):
Yeah. So I think like dos, those terms are hard to rank for, you know, because they’re, they’re big search volume terms. So we use a couple of tools where we’ll look at the search volumes and we’ll also try and find some longer tail keywords that they could rank for more easily. So we’ll put those words and phrases in the description. So, you know, the title is important, the bullets are important. And then all the backend information and search terms, search terms are important there as well as the images are critical and other things, but those are the, you know, the things that will get you ranked are your title, your description, your bullets, and, you know, that’s how you’ll get ranked. And then of course your conversion rates. So in terms of advertising, a lot of times, one of the other things we’ll do is we’ll set up a couple of things.
Carolyn (20:59):
We’ll do like a little auto campaign, which is sort of like Amazon goes and finds which, which products based on all that stuff in your listing would make sense. So search terms you hadn’t thought of before, and then you can do manual campaigns where you say, I only want to show up on these search terms. But then the other one that we love is a product display campaign. So you can go out and find all the pencil sharpeners that are below four stars that are more expensive than you and show up on their pages. So say you’re on a page of a $12 pencil sharpener, that’s three and a half stars. And then your ad shows up on that product detail page that says, Hey, here’s one for nine 99 and it’s four and a half stars. So which one are you going to buy? Right.
Charles (21:41):
Okay. So I wanna make sure I’m taking notes here. So basically how do you do this? So you find out, so there’s a way on Amazon to find all the products that are a higher cost than you, but were star rating and then just go after them basically.
Carolyn (21:55):
Yep. So you can do, it’s called like product targeting. It’s called ASEN product targeting and it’s part of this it’s a product display campaign and you say, okay, I want to find everything in my category. And then you can refine it even for, even more and say, okay, I only want ones that are this stars or below, or these prices and below. So it’s really like, you find that what I call the dogs in your category and we’ve seen conversion rate work really well on those. Right. If you’re cheaper and rated higher, of course, you know, consumers would want to buy that product.
Charles (22:30):
Yeah. Do they give you any insights into how many views those products are getting? So, you know, Hey, like this is a three star product and I’m half the price. And just like, this is the one and just focus on that one or you just kind of hoping they get, you know, cause like these products would also be on page 10. Right. And nobody’s looking at them, they’re also just dogs. So does it give you any insight into that or?
Carolyn (22:54):
Yeah, so it, it does, like, you can see all of your impressions and clicks and everything by ASEN. So ASEN is like, you know, like Amazon’s unique identifier. It’s like ESPN for books and ACEs for non books. So yeah, you can go through and see, okay. I saw the ACE and for this peanut butter does way better. And so you can turn on and off a, you can bid higher on certain ones that are performing better and where you have like an average cost of sale of 20% or below, you can say, great, I want to bid up on this one. That’s converting really well. And I want to turn off this one that, you know, isn’t converting. So it’s down to that product level.
Charles (23:34):
The ACN is the Amazon standard identification number. So little fun fact, everyone says it, but I don’t know how many people know that. So they go, that is a great fun fact. Look, I learned
Carolyn (23:46):
Something today. I’ve been using that for five years and I never looked up what it actually States.
Charles (23:51):
Yup. Amazon standard identification number. That’s so such an Amazon thing to name something. I L that’s a good one right there. I never heard of kind of just targeting basically you’re going right after your competitors at that point. And you don’t, don’t go after the top and do the smart thing. Right. Don’t have to go off to the competitors that are better than you find the ones that are worse. That if you’re just going head to head, if you’re comparing, someone’s comparing apples to apples, you’re just a better Apple and people are going to buy your product. And then at that point, so then you have basically right down the bottom where they say if you got the term not sponsor sponsored products, right? So you’re searching down on a product page. It’s like halfway down. You’ll just be one of those at that point. Right.
Carolyn (24:34):
You can be one of those, or it will actually show up on that detail page right below the buy box where it says, add to cart. There’s usually one product featured.
Charles (24:43):
Very cool. Any other tips like that? I like these little that’s a good one. Anything else that’s kind of working right now?
Carolyn (24:51):
Yep. So we talked a little bit about sponsored video that is working great. Big tip. There is the sound is off. So make sure you have texts over. We’ve seen people run ads that have voiceover not text over and, you know, back in the pre coven days, if you were sitting in your cube, you’re not going to have your sound on as you’re shopping Amazon. So a lot of times one brand gave me a great video. It was 30 seconds. So I, I cut it down with a movie and I added text overlay and that was getting a like a 15% ACOs. So meaning you were getting close to a five X return on ad spend six X return on ad spend.
Charles (25:30):
Oh yeah. I’ve always, I’ve seen the ones when they do it well, right. Video and audio the text and the audio sync up, because what ends up happening is you start usually a strong row and unless you’re a complete crazy person, you have sound off when you’re scrolling in basically any app that you can see scrolling, it sounds off and you start seeing the text. And if it looks at all interesting, you pause and you start reading and then if you’re really interested, then you go hit that on new button and then you actually hear the audio. So you want both, I would think right where they, and they sync up. So then you’re able to start with a text, jumped to the audio, and then you really, that means the person’s engaged at that point.
Carolyn (26:09):
Yeah. And a lot of brands don’t have access to, to that. So what a lot of them will do, and I think is great, is just use like free audio as background music, because you don’t need a professional voiceover because like you said, 90% of the people are never going to hear it. So we actually say, you know, you can shoot this in and make a video. Like you can deal with an iPhone if you need to. We’ve seen some amazing videos shot with iPhones and then you just pop them into iMovie. I can’t even draw a stick figure, but I was able to do I movie and put text overlays and include the company logo on the first, you know, on the first frame and all of that. So,
Charles (26:50):
Well, this is also very cheap. I’m trying to think of the, I’m finding the show notes, but some very cheap ways to do voiceovers now where I think I’ve hired a, like a voice professional. And I was like, I want a male with a cool British accent. And, you know, just to get really specific. And it comes back to like such a small cost and like the, literally you can get like 12 different people will apply and they’re all just like cool British accents. And you’re like, Oh, this is fantastic. I can pick her my accent.
Carolyn (27:21):
It’s cool. It’s like the Upwork of,
Charles (27:23):
Yeah, it’s what’s the, what’s the one it’s similar to Upwork, but it’s like a dollar one of those sites and very good with voiceovers. I’ve done it with Upwork before and the process takes a little longer, but if you kind of do, I’ll find us at it’s just very easy to get a voiceover so that I think even people that, you know, cause you don’t on an ad, you probably don’t want my voice sort of thing. Certain people just have not the right accent. So I think people make the project to be a lot bigger than it really is. So you can get a voiceover done fast cheap. And the nice part is just try it. Right. A lot of this, I don’t know if Amazon are they doing dynamic ads right now where you can kind of slot in like four or five different creatives and it flop switches them around or are they doing that as well?
Carolyn (28:14):
Yeah, there’s a bunch of different. That’s more on the Amazon advertising, like the off Amazon advertising, the on Amazon is pretty standard, but off Amazon, they are doing a bunch of different testing options. What most people don’t know is, you know, they used to have a $35,000 a month minimum ad spend. So a lot of smaller brands that, that wasn’t a good fit for them. But as an Amazon agency partner, we’re able to use some of that, what they call the DSP platform that display platform to, you know, maybe combine average different brands dollars together so that they can get onto the platform for, you know, $10,000 to do some of this off Amazon advertising.
Charles (28:57):
Oh, so is that the truck? So if you’re small, you can go to an agency and okay. So you can basically kind of like use the da as long as the agency is spending the 35, then you know, amongst many brands you can get in a, you know, several couple thousand a month.
Carolyn (29:14):
Yeah. So because we’re, we’re one of like 200 Amazon certified agency partners in the country. We have access to some of these things and we say, okay, great. Well, you know, this brand can’t afford 35. What if we get, you know, three brands in total, we spent, you know, 35. And so that’s one of the advantages of going with the agency. And also just a lot of times we have access to betas. So before sponsored brands came out for everybody, we got it for our brands. So the seller central, which is the backend of Amazon for, for, you know, third party sellers who aren’t selling direct to Amazon we actually were part of that usability and a lot of the new features that are coming out that came out around. So now you have access to demographics. Who’s buying your product. Do you have access to not just click through, but conversion data on different searches. So you can search on pencil sharpener. You can see who’s ranked number one. You can see what their click share is and their conversion share. So you can see who you could be, you know, who you should be going up against. So there’s a lot of really interesting things that are coming out of seller central and we’ve helped them develop, Hey, this is what will be useful for brands to know.
Charles (30:24):
Very cool. Yeah. Advertising is one of those things where you want to be on the betas or alphas earliest on possible, whatever exclusive invites, you know I think most folks will say you’re old enough to remember when Instagram was cheap and now it’s not an event. People remember when Facebook was cheap and I’m old enough to remember when ad-words was cheap. So, you know, at some point like 10 cent clicks. Yeah. Like you could just, you go on, you know, insurance agents and it was 10 cents. And like, this is great, you know, I’ll make my hit this forever. And then it turns out that went to a hundred and now only stuck the like, so now everyone kind of flooded in, but if you have early access, some of these platforms and some guessing, like aren’t the most useful platforms, but others do really well. And all of a sudden you have like this very short window, we can really get a lot of traffic throat and hopefully make those users your own and then capture them for long term. So that’s a very cool thing having access early on. I like that.
Carolyn (31:22):
Yeah. And you’re talking about chief platforms, you know, we’re seeing great, great cost per clicks and cost per thousands on Snapchat, like Facebook and Instagram, like five years ago. And the interesting thing is that the us government hasn’t come down on Snapchat. So they have all the data and purchase data that Facebook used to have access to a couple of years ago. So it’s, it’s a very interesting platform. We’ve tested it, doesn’t, it doesn’t test as well as Facebook and Instagram, but it is definitely much cheaper. So from a, from a brand awareness and traffic standpoint, we’re finding some great stuff there. And then we’ve we’ve got some friends over at the tick tock office in Austin. So they’ve opened a big office here in Austin and we’ve got to tick dock advertising a seat as well. So
Charles (32:15):
Yeah, that’s the one I was tech talk at zone.
Carolyn (32:18):
We’re just in the process of, you know, testing it out with a couple of brands. We don’t have any statistically significant data to share yet, but I think those two brands will become interesting, you know, as you know, there’s been a lot of backlash with, with Facebook and we’ve for the first time ever, there was a lot of [inaudible] going on out there and you know, a lot brands are like, okay, Hey, if I pull from it, Facebook and Instagram, I mean, that’s 80% of where my traffic comes from. What do you guys recommend next? So we’re having a lot of those conversations around, okay. I’m amping up, Google display, amping up YouTube advertising for, for brands that have video assets looking at more Snapchat and tick talk and, and other platforms as well. If, you know, when we sit around and think about like, what if you lost 50% of your business tomorrow? You know, the two things that could happen right, is Facebook somehow gets shut down or, you know, Facebook and Instagram gets shut down or or Amazon, you know, has no love lost between the president and Jeff Bezos. So I mean, if something happens there and Amazon gets shut down, what do you do? So we’re always thinking about what’s the next thing. And, and you know, what makes sense if these platforms get shut down?
Charles (33:36):
Yeah. I like the idea of Snapchat and tech talk, right? Because like you said, it’s hard to get data at the beginning. Cause sometimes they don’t provide the data, even an arrow around with Amazon. They’re like advertising console is very, very basic. Or like Shopify just came out with the ad platform and they give is close to no data as possible. Just like, Hey, as much as Spanish. And you’re like, okay, great. That’s nice. But the nice pie, the nice part about that is a lot of people, if you can do well at that, a lot of people aren’t like right now, ad-words Facebook. It’s so dialed in that folks know for every dollar they put in this much, they get out. Exactly. So they’re willing to go some huge numbers and big brands can really invest. So you as a small brand can’t, but some of these small platforms, you don’t really have the data.
Charles (34:24):
It’s still like the wild West. So the big brands haven’t come in yet. And there’s still a lot of opportunity because it, so the bad side of, you know, is it so crazy, but the good side is it’s so crazy and no one else is willing to really get into it. So if you’re the one that can really dig into that, it’s, you know, at the beginning, I think it’s a great thing. So good one. Awesome. Phew. If people want to kind of find, you kind of see what you’re working on, learn more about the agency. What can they do that?
Carolyn (34:54):
Yeah, they can head on over to our website and our website where like the cobbler with no shoes, right. We spend all our time driving traffic to other people’s websites. So we do have a website, but don’t judge us on the website. It’s a ROI swift.com. You can also head over to LinkedIn and go to the ROS with page or just connect with me. Personally, we do offer a free audit for anybody running Facebook ads or Google ads or doing like, you know, 20,000 a month or more on Amazon. And we’ll audit and tell you if you’re doing as good as you can or if you could be doing better. So it’s one of the things that we like to pride ourselves on is, is honesty and will tell you if we can help you. And we never want to take money from somebody that we can’t help. So yeah, you can head on over to our website and check it out. Awesome. I really appreciate you coming on today. It was great chatting. Thanks for having me, Charles.