Latest / Selling on Giants: The eCommerce Marketplace Podcast / How Creative Impacts Advertising- Why A/B Testing is More Important than Ever
Transcript
- 0:02SPEAKER_01: Hey everyone, this is Selling on Giants, the e-commerce marketplace show, where we chat with experts in the e-commerce industry and talk about the latest insights, strategies, and best practices you need to succeed on major e-commerce marketplaces.
- 0:15SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Victor Dwyer, and today we are joined by Robin Johnson, co-founder of Marketplace Blueprint, recognized as one of the nation's leading authorities on selling and marketing products on Amazon.com.
- 0:27SPEAKER_01: Robin has been featured guest on popular shows like Entrepreneur on Fire and Confessions of a Marketer and serves as a SEM Rush Academy professor.
- 0:36SPEAKER_01: Before we dive into how creative impacts advertising and why A B testing is more important than ever, Robin, please give a little intro about yourself and what you're currently working on.
- 0:46SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean I've been eating, sleeping, breathing Amazon for a little years now, almost 13, which is like dinosaur ages when it comes to the space.
- 0:55SPEAKER_00: I started as a reseller.
- 0:57SPEAKER_00: I, you know, we started 13 years ago buying things, reselling them.
- 1:00SPEAKER_00: We moved to eBay then Amazon.
- 1:02SPEAKER_00: We grew that to a million dollars from$100.
- 1:04SPEAKER_00: And then we spent several years not only selling at a high volume on Amazon, but also coaching high volume sellers.
- 1:11SPEAKER_00: About seven years ago, about we started our agency and we started working specifically with brands, like identifying that Amazon was such a big problem for brand owners.
- 1:21SPEAKER_00: And so now we are a full channel management.
- 1:24SPEAKER_00: We do like integrated search and advertising on Amazon.
- 1:27SPEAKER_00: So we handle everything from small pre-launch brands all the way up to publicly traded companies, not only doing the listing optimization and advertising, but also like some of the compliance issues and the lovely informed stuff that Amazon has been happening.
- 1:39SPEAKER_00: So we kind of have been able to see things from a different perspective, working with companies of different sizes, seeing the platform evolve over the last couple of years, and especially, you know, in the last two or three years, the changes have really affected the type of sellers that are having the most success on Amazon.
- 1:58SPEAKER_00: Um, and the kind of brands that we're seeing that are even though price costs have been uh pinched and uh there's definitely a weakening in consumer confidence, we are still seeing some significant growth in several of our brands.
- 2:11SPEAKER_01: That's great.
- 2:12SPEAKER_01: Can you go into real fast when you said the types of brands that are being affected on Amazon?
- 2:18SPEAKER_01: Can you go into that for a second?
- 2:19SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it used to be like we joke about Field of Dreams, but for a while, Amazon was literally that.
- 2:25SPEAKER_00: You put it up on Amazon, it would sell, it was magic.
- 2:27SPEAKER_00: You could make a guru course in like 15 minutes because, you know, like there were people looking for garlic presses on Amazon, and there were, you know, not 7,000 of them like there are now.
- 2:38SPEAKER_00: So I was uh cleaning out my hard drive and I found this old webinar on ads.
- 2:43SPEAKER_00: And I said, if you have an ACOS of over 3%, you're just paying too much.
- 2:48SPEAKER_00: That's way too high.
- 2:49SPEAKER_00: There's no reason, you know, like this is back in the day.
- 2:51SPEAKER_00: And I was like looking back, I'm like, we were printing money.
- 2:54SPEAKER_00: What were we doing?
- 2:55SPEAKER_00: You know, um, so the type of seller that does well before the platform was very wild, wild west.
- 3:01SPEAKER_00: You didn't have to have a sophisticated marketing strategy.
- 3:04SPEAKER_00: I was actually just talking to a brand that had had a lot of success in over the last several years, they've been really stalled and it feels like nothing they do works on the platform.
- 3:14SPEAKER_00: They're like the platform is broken.
- 3:15SPEAKER_00: In the meantime, I'm seeing all these brands that are having tremendous growth, even luxury brands, tremendous growth in our portfolio.
- 3:21SPEAKER_00: And what I think the difference is is that if you came to Amazon and throw the spaghetti on the wall face, that now it feels like something is wrong.
- 3:30SPEAKER_00: But if you came from a Google background or you know, meta background, then you're like, oh, well, this makes sense.
- 3:37SPEAKER_00: Now we've got to think about upper and lower final.
- 3:39SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you think about it, creative on advertising wasn't even an issue two or three years ago.
- 3:44SPEAKER_00: And then when we're talking about one image and 50 characters of call-out text, right?
- 3:48SPEAKER_00: Now we've got video ads, we've got sponsored display, we've got DSP.
- 3:51SPEAKER_00: There's just a lot more involved on the creative side beyond just having a good primary photo and at least moderately compelling title.
- 4:00SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 4:00SPEAKER_01: And that's where I usually preach about this to the highest depths of every cliff off every rooftop.
- 4:06SPEAKER_01: And it's talking about the difference between a seller and a brand.
- 4:10SPEAKER_01: Sellers like are usually saying, like, oh, they're just on Amazon and they're not used to this whole like multi-level strategy of high and low funnel and type of thing.
- 4:18SPEAKER_01: They're just used to being at the bottom of the funnel, getting all the sales.
- 4:21SPEAKER_01: But when a brand, they're very used to like having to go and do external traffic to their website and like get the uh customer attention and things like that.
- 4:30SPEAKER_01: And that's where they're able to pull all that information and really grab that.
- 4:34SPEAKER_01: And that's what really makes a brand successful rather than a seller.
- 4:39SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
- 4:39SPEAKER_00: And you know, we didn't really talk about customer acquisition.
- 4:42SPEAKER_00: We never talked about CRO conversion rate optimization on Amazon until very, very recently because Amazon really did most of it.
- 4:50SPEAKER_00: We didn't need to think about it.
- 4:51SPEAKER_00: Amazon handled all of that.
- 4:53SPEAKER_00: I remember speaking at an SEO conference, and this was like, you know, probably about seven years ago, and somebody who was very involved in technical SEO said, Well, how do you handle schema on Amazon?
- 5:02SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I mean, I knew what schema was, but I was like, we don't.
- 5:05SPEAKER_00: And it took me a second to be like, oh, yeah, Amazon handles all of that.
- 5:07SPEAKER_00: And they still do handle all the crawlability stuff, but especially as you know, they're testing how a lot of things display, uh like the structured data surfacing and things along those lines, there's definitely more to manage than there was two or three years ago, even.
- 5:20SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 5:20SPEAKER_01: And I'd love to really dive in and like, what are some general A-B tests that you run for clients?
- 5:26SPEAKER_01: Love to start with that.
- 5:27SPEAKER_00: So when it comes to A B testing, sometimes we have clients that change because they just want to keep innovating.
- 5:33SPEAKER_00: And there is a difference between just changing something to play with it and then having a strategic A B testing strategy where we're focusing on making fine-tuned details.
- 5:44SPEAKER_00: So sometimes people will say, I'm gonna make a bunch of changes to the listing and I'm gonna see if that helps.
- 5:48SPEAKER_00: That's not A-B testing.
- 5:49SPEAKER_00: A-B testing is one variable at a time, taking into consideration the seasonality.
- 5:54SPEAKER_00: So let's say I was gonna run a one-month A B test right now.
- 5:58SPEAKER_00: I would really need to have that data be suspect for most of our products because that right now that would put you in the middle of prime day.
- 6:05SPEAKER_00: And so there's gonna be a dip, there's gonna be a rise.
- 6:07SPEAKER_00: The data is not gonna actually be accurate.
- 6:09SPEAKER_00: So we want to make sure that we're testing things that are screams and not whispers, right?
- 6:13SPEAKER_00: So, yes, once you get things really fine-tuned, you can test to see if adding a hyphen or removing a hyphen makes a difference.
- 6:20SPEAKER_00: But in the beginning, you should be testing what is actually causing that conversion.
- 6:24SPEAKER_00: So, what triggers internally in our agency, like let's start A-B testing a specific thing, is if we see specifically changes in conversion, we see products that are underperforming conversion-wise or click-through rate rise.
- 6:37SPEAKER_00: So it's easier to see this if you have a larger product mix where you can kind of have a barometer.
- 6:41SPEAKER_00: But now with Amazon brand analytics, you can start to see about like share and things along those lines, is where you can say, okay, my product is underperforming.
- 6:48SPEAKER_00: Another simple thing you can do is you can sort your detailed sales and traffic report page.
- 6:53SPEAKER_00: And the products that have the most orders should also have the best conversion rate.
- 6:57SPEAKER_00: If you have your best-selling product has a lower conversion rate than some of your other ones, then that could indicate that maybe there's some optimization.
- 7:05SPEAKER_00: Now, not always.
- 7:06SPEAKER_00: And there are times where we say your conversion rate is too good.
- 7:09SPEAKER_00: So if you're converting it over 30%, then that's an indicator that you need to A B test your title as well and A-B test your content because likely you're only bringing in people with coming in on branded search.
- 7:21SPEAKER_00: So you might have written, you know, like fuzzy was it gel.
- 7:24SPEAKER_00: And that will be very effective in bringing in people and converting people who know your brand name, but especially if you have a fanciful brand name that's not tied to your product, then you're not going to get any other traffic because you're not going to be indexed for those other words.
- 7:37SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we have seen that there's a difference between the way we launch, say something that's more along the lines of a product or a private label versus an established brand.
- 7:46SPEAKER_00: Because in an established brand, we don't need to have the exact match on a lot of phrase search keyword phrases that we do on maybe some a brand that's not as well known.
- 7:55SPEAKER_00: Because as soon as Lego launches, the new one is Hocus Pocus, then as soon as they launch their new Hocus Pocus Lego set, the minute that goes live, they will get conversions for Lego, Hocus, Pocus, you know, they all of that will happen.
- 8:09SPEAKER_00: They could they could just put the model up number and they would get those sales right away.
- 8:13SPEAKER_00: And then they'll have that conversion history, right?
- 8:15SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you are FUTZI What's it's lotion, I don't know why I made that up, but that's just, you know, then you're not going to get conversions right away unless you say Fuzy What's It's ultra-hydrating lotion for African American skin or whatever niche it is, you have to kind of put the exact words in.
- 8:31SPEAKER_00: And we have seen the A B testing like some exact matches of keyword phrases, especially if it's one that we are already ranking for, but we're trying to get from like position 12 to position three.
- 8:42SPEAKER_00: If we combine that with, you know, A-B testing to make sure the title is best.
- 8:45SPEAKER_00: And then once we get the title honed in, combining that with the advertising and coupons or sales like that, we can start to hold more of those first positions for our most important keywords.
- 8:55SPEAKER_00: And I don't know about you, but one of the things that we've been seeing that I think can stump some sellers that have been around on the platform longer is it used to be index for as many keywords as possible, maximize your total, just like spread your keywords outspread.
- 9:07SPEAKER_00: And we're still gonna bid on a lot of things, but being indexed for 10,000 words means nothing if you don't hold the top 10 positions and really the top five positions for your most important, most relevant keywords.
- 9:18SPEAKER_00: So when in doubt, you know, narrow your focus.
- 9:21SPEAKER_00: One of the things that we've done recently on a brand that were really successful is they had a lot of keywords in their listing.
- 9:27SPEAKER_00: They were indexed for a lot of things, but they weren't ranked for things.
- 9:30SPEAKER_00: So we rewrote the listing and the title and the bullet and the images, focusing on conversion.
- 9:35SPEAKER_00: So focusing on what the customer needed to know, not trying to maximize the overall number of words.
- 9:41SPEAKER_00: That helped them to better rank in combination with some A-B testing and coupons and things along those lines for those most important keywords and take that position from somebody who was selling significantly more and push them further down the ranking.
- 9:54SPEAKER_00: So they were able to increase their organic sales, but it does take time to do that.
- 9:58SPEAKER_00: And it does take a mix of upper and lower funnel now and retargeting, which you know, you have to test.
- 10:04SPEAKER_00: You know, I've talked to a couple, we sometimes we'll do audits for other agencies and I'll talk to the rep and they're like, well, we tried sponsored display.
- 10:12SPEAKER_00: Well, tell me more about how you tried it because one, that product is not the same as it was two years ago.
- 10:18SPEAKER_00: It's much more effective.
- 10:19SPEAKER_00: And two, depending on how you had that targeting set up, that targeting might not, the targeting that's there now might not have existed six months ago.
- 10:26SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 10:26SPEAKER_01: And you talked about having your best product having the highest conversion rate.
- 10:31SPEAKER_01: But can you go into a little bit about the scale factor of how when you have significantly more traffic, that usually the conversion rate from what I see goes down?
- 10:42SPEAKER_01: Like, can you go into like when you start sending a lot more traffic to the listing, how that conversion rate might go down or maybe stay the same?
- 10:50SPEAKER_01: I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
- 10:51SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 10:51SPEAKER_00: So in general, when you widen your funnel, so if you start out marketing, let's say you're a brand with existing volume, when you start marketing on Amazon and if you're focusing on just branded search, you're gonna get a much higher conversion rate as you expand the funnel out to colder keywords, kind of think about like warmer leads versus colder leads, people who maybe didn't come in to purchase your products, you will see a drop in conversion there.
- 11:13SPEAKER_00: So if you're in the middle of launching, in the middle of kind of like establishing your place, that might change.
- 11:19SPEAKER_00: And it's not necessarily that your best-selling product should have the highest conversion rate, necessarily.
- 11:25SPEAKER_00: But if your best selling product has a conversion rate of five, and then you have similar products in a similar category in your brand that are converting at 14 or 13%, it doesn't mean that the listing is wrong.
- 11:36SPEAKER_00: In fact, the listing could be perfect, but it could be there's something wrong with the listing.
- 11:40SPEAKER_00: It could be that there's competitor pricing that is causing you to have customers come and leave and not come back, but it could also be that the targeting on your advertising is off.
- 11:49SPEAKER_00: So one of the things that's really important in A B testing is to synchronize the A-B testing on the creative with your advertising team.
- 11:56SPEAKER_00: So that's going to your advertising team and saying, what are the keyword phrases that we convert for the best?
- 12:02SPEAKER_00: And actually verifying and looking at Amazon brand analytics to a degree and saying, what are the things that my competitors are getting the best conversions off of?
- 12:10SPEAKER_00: You can do that with Cerebro as well.
- 12:12SPEAKER_00: And then looking at several brands that are like, these are the keywords that are most important.
- 12:16SPEAKER_00: And then those don't convert at all, right?
- 12:18SPEAKER_00: So sometimes there's a rabbit hole in trying to redo a bunch of A-B testing on keywords to try to get them to convert when in reality there is no getting them to convert.
- 12:27SPEAKER_00: They're not the right keywords.
- 12:29SPEAKER_00: They might be how you describe your product, but they're not how your customer searches for your product.
- 12:33SPEAKER_00: And understanding and being willing to look at that is an important part of being a brander and what you discover on Amazon, you can take and apply that towards your organic SEO and other lower funnel items because Amazon is so bottom of the funnel that could help you redirect how you write your transitional focused blog posts, things along those lines.
- 12:55SPEAKER_00: So you can take that data and apply it across multiple platforms.
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- 13:34SPEAKER_01: And you talked about a lot of different tests to really help increase conversion rate.
- 13:39SPEAKER_01: And I know this is gonna be a very like kind of broad and general question, but what would you say is your top three most important things when it comes down to A-B testing first?
- 13:49SPEAKER_01: Is it the title?
- 13:50SPEAKER_01: Is it the main image?
- 13:52SPEAKER_01: Like I'd love to get your thoughts on what are the three most important things for you when it comes to A-B testing an Amazon product page?
- 13:58SPEAKER_00: So it's gonna be the primary image and the title are gonna be tied because if you think about it for most of your ads, a lot of people are gonna get most of their performance-based conversions from ads off of some sort of sponsored product or sponsored brand where the creative is really going to be your primary image, your title, those kinds of things.
- 14:16SPEAKER_00: So especially if we're seeing poor click-through rate, poor conversion, or below benchmark.
- 14:22SPEAKER_00: And you know, if you're working with an agency that's uh an Amazon partner, sometimes you can get some category benchmarking that is confidential.
- 14:28SPEAKER_00: It can only be shared between you and them, but it's on a per case basis that may or may not be available depending on what category you're in.
- 14:37SPEAKER_00: But there are some things that uh like the title and the bullets are going to be the driving thing.
- 14:43SPEAKER_00: So you want to think about the click-through rate when like think about how when you shop on Amazon, you just type in something and then you look at the results really quickly.
- 14:51SPEAKER_00: So any kind of pattern interrupt that you can create is your product.
- 14:55SPEAKER_00: We had a product where on the images it was a supplement, right?
- 14:59SPEAKER_00: And their bottle looked smaller because they had it cropped farther away and they had added added the you know, a shadow at the bottom to make it look nicer.
- 15:08SPEAKER_00: By taking the shadow off, cropping it tighter, it made it so that on the thumbnail on all the ads on the product detail pages, now their product looked the same size because before, even though their quantity count was higher, it looked like their bottle was smaller.
- 15:21SPEAKER_00: We've also seen things where maybe if you change the way an item is positioned or proportioned, it changes the way that the thumbnail displays and it can make it so it's easier to read what's on the label, those kinds of things.
- 15:33SPEAKER_00: I'm not suggesting that you go outside of terms of service.
- 15:36SPEAKER_00: And there's lots of within terms of service ways to change up the way that you display your product.
- 15:41SPEAKER_00: And, you know, for those young brands, one pitfall that I see a lot of times is people cheaping out on the packaging.
- 15:47SPEAKER_00: You can't put text on your listing page, but you can show your product packaging.
- 15:53SPEAKER_00: And your product packaging, especially if you don't have something where you have your own mold, that's something that's going to be helpful in you just trying to determine whether a product is counterfeit or not.
- 16:02SPEAKER_00: So there are other benefits beyond having that.
- 16:05SPEAKER_00: But you know, should you include the package?
- 16:07SPEAKER_00: Should you not include the package?
- 16:09SPEAKER_00: Should you show the product blown up, collapsed, you know, in action, only follow the terms of service.
- 16:15SPEAKER_00: It should only be the product, nothing for scale, no text.
- 16:17SPEAKER_00: We all know the blah, blah, blah, full white background.
- 16:19SPEAKER_00: But there's still a lot of room to maneuver within those guidelines.
- 16:23SPEAKER_00: And on the title, with the caveman grunt test, do I know what your product is?
- 16:28SPEAKER_00: Sometimes people are so focused on maximizing the number of keywords, it reads like water bottle filter, da da da da treat infuser great, right?
- 16:36SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't read right, right?
- 16:37SPEAKER_00: And it does a couple of things.
- 16:39SPEAKER_00: When you jam all those keywords in there, one, it makes it hard for a human eye to read and quickly identify.
- 16:44SPEAKER_00: And I think for some buyers, especially sophisticated buyers that know a little bit about digital marketing, it cheapens your product because even if people don't understand why, it feels like not a real brand.
- 16:57SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes I'm talking with contemporaries in my space that maybe are their own private label, and they might look at a listing we do and say, well, why didn't you do it this way?
- 17:05SPEAKER_00: And there's sometimes where the brand guidelines, where the brand aesthetic, the brand voice is more important than cramming in 10 more keywords or five more keywords or one keyword and more keyword in the title, where it's more important to keep the consistency in the way that the brand has its voice and the way that customers expect to see that brand represented is going to be more important to conversion than adding another three keyword phrase.
- 17:28SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 17:28SPEAKER_00: And that's what we have to test that to know.
- 17:31SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 17:32SPEAKER_01: Yes, you got all the data.
- 17:34SPEAKER_01: And I usually say that it's so important if you do have those strict brand guidelines, it's really important to still have that testing mentality with it.
- 17:44SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of these brands, I had this one brand that um wouldn't let me test this user-generated content.
- 17:50SPEAKER_01: It was very, very poorly done.
- 17:51SPEAKER_01: And they're like, Victor, I'm not letting you run this.
- 17:54SPEAKER_01: And I was like, just let me test it out.
- 17:56SPEAKER_01: Just let me test it out.
- 17:57SPEAKER_01: And eventually, after lots of back and forth, they finally let me test it out and ended up being our top performer and made them over$10,000 in sales from that one user-generated content.
- 18:07SPEAKER_01: And that's where it's like so important to test, even though it may be a little bit out of your either guidelines or anything else like that, but it's still super critical to test those things because you never know out of those tests what may be working better versus your own brand guidelines.
- 18:25SPEAKER_01: So I usually say to the client, try to go a little bit outside your comfort zone sometimes because you can get some huge results off of it.
- 18:32SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you know, you don't have to test all of your products.
- 18:34SPEAKER_00: So you can take a product, whether it's a bestseller or a medium seller, you can test going outside of those brand guidelines and see how it works.
- 18:41SPEAKER_00: There's lots of other ways to test if a different kind of imaging, you so that of course we can test title, we can test images, but also testing a lot of ad creative.
- 18:49SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes you can test a different kind of ad creative that presents your brand in a different way without changing the front end of your listing.
- 18:56SPEAKER_00: But like you said, if you're a brand listening, you do want to test.
- 19:00SPEAKER_00: You know, you might have 15 years of knowledge of knowing that this is what your customers expect, but it might be that the customers, the subsect of your Amazon customers might be different.
- 19:09SPEAKER_00: So once you've tested that, then you know, but it's still good to go back and redo those tests on a like maybe a yearly or quarterly basis, depending on how your brand evolves too, because your customer and how they search is evolving as well.
- 19:23SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna see more evolution in the way that people type in keywords as we see AI start to play a bigger role and people starting to get uh more used to interaction with those searches.
- 19:35SPEAKER_00: Amazon's already playing with AI to a degree in summarizing reviews.
- 19:39SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we can anticipate that some of that's going forward.
- 19:42SPEAKER_00: And the other thing that I think is important for brands to know is that auto-complete that Amazon generates can yield some very different behavior than you might see on other channels like Google, where on the keyword searches, you might have keywords that don't normally or we wouldn't expect to perform, perform really well.
- 20:00SPEAKER_00: And that's why when we want to connect the ad testing, the ads to the A-B testing, seeing what works on the ads.
- 20:08SPEAKER_00: And then that justifies going outside of the brand guidelines and running that experiment to see with if, you know, if that makes a significant impact to conversion.
- 20:17SPEAKER_00: And there's sometimes where, you know, a brand will say it doesn't matter how much conversion traffic that changes, that's not how we want our brand represented.
- 20:23SPEAKER_00: And sometimes there's legal or compliance issues that they're trying to avoid, but at least you can have the data to understand, you know, where you're leaving money on the table.
- 20:32SPEAKER_00: So if things were to change with your company, then you at least know all of the potential path to profitability, which I think that A B testing as ads get more and more expensive, as there's more and more adoption rate in sponsored products, and now we're seeing it in video, that A B testing is going to give you that incremental difference, especially on consumable items, where perhaps you can consider that your costs on Amazon are like a customer acquisition cost, and then you know that you'll be able to retarget them through sponsored display to repurchase at a lower overall acquisition.
- 21:03SPEAKER_00: So you can kind of look at kind of your tacos and like how that these A-B tests can make slight incremental differences to your tacos.
- 21:11SPEAKER_00: But I think the most dramatic difference that we've seen is in the ability to get us to be able to rank in the top three positions for a keyword phrase that we've been struggling to get to that.
- 21:21SPEAKER_00: Sometimes by changing the order of words or changing where they show up in the title, it can make a difference partly because of something in the algorithm, but also partly in making sure that customers are able to identify that this product is for them or not for them before they click your ad.
- 21:35SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's really interesting.
- 21:37SPEAKER_01: And what would you say to someone that's trying to optimize their creative when it comes to like videos, um, the video advertising placement on Amazon, those sponsor brand videos?
- 21:47SPEAKER_01: Do you have any A B tests or optimizations you would make to really optimize those first three seconds of the video that tend to convert higher?
- 21:55SPEAKER_01: Do you have any data on that?
- 21:56SPEAKER_00: I think that there are some benefits to running some of those videos.
- 22:00SPEAKER_00: Videos off Amazon where you get more visibility into engagement as well.
- 22:04SPEAKER_00: One thing that we'll look at is if your primary target audience is on a specific social media platform and that video has done well and had good engagement and it has caused conversions on your website, then those are obviously the videos we want to do first.
- 22:16SPEAKER_00: We want to mimic those things.
- 22:18SPEAKER_00: If you don't have any video assets, you really should be testing multiple approaches, looking at the reviews, identifying what customers said were the most important and making sure that the things that cause customers to purchase your product over your others is visible very quickly.
- 22:32SPEAKER_00: Skip the stupid intros.
- 22:34SPEAKER_00: Nobody needs to see your logo for 15 seconds at the beginning of the video.
- 22:37SPEAKER_00: It has to rely on captions.
- 22:40SPEAKER_00: How many of us don't shop on Amazon when we're work and we're supposed to be on another call or something along those lines?
- 22:46SPEAKER_00: So most people listen to video off.
- 22:49SPEAKER_00: But the most important thing is, you know, that video is going to be flickering sometimes at the top, sometimes at the bottom.
- 22:54SPEAKER_00: It needs to catch their attention and help them quickly see that this product is better for them than the alternatives.
- 23:00SPEAKER_00: So, you know, especially if you're in a competitive market like a garlic press, it looks like you might want to focus more.
- 23:06SPEAKER_00: People already know what a garlic press does if they're searching for a garlic press.
- 23:10SPEAKER_00: You don't need to say that it presses garlic.
- 23:12SPEAKER_00: You want to say that it's blood tested or, you know, that it's it's recommended by Thomas Keller or whatever it is that makes your product unique or how you're positioning that product in the marketplace as a good buy, whether it be value, be quality.
- 23:26SPEAKER_00: And if you don't have a unique selling proposition, then it's going to be only harder every month to sell on Amazon because to just be another garlic press is being more and more difficult because the people who have lots of money are coming in and doing that.
- 23:42SPEAKER_00: And they can take much lower margins than you can to be successful.
- 23:46SPEAKER_00: And they're able to get debt a lot less expensively.
- 23:49SPEAKER_00: So you need to be doing some A-B testing before product development.
- 23:53SPEAKER_00: So that means focus groups, which is also goes to the video creative.
- 23:57SPEAKER_00: I see a lot of brands skipping the focus group.
- 24:00SPEAKER_00: You don't have to run an official focus group.
- 24:02SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think that it's worth its weight in gold.
- 24:05SPEAKER_00: And I can tell you there's a difference when we work with a brand that has done significant focus testing.
- 24:10SPEAKER_00: But even if you offer people a$50 gift card, you know, you have to qualify to make sure you're their customer and then do some informal focus group testing using, or even using something like PicBoo or one of those other products that allow people to give you feedback on your product.
- 24:24SPEAKER_00: I think that that is really, really helpful in making sure that you're positioning and creating a product that people actually want to purchase.
- 24:31SPEAKER_01: I loved it.
- 24:31SPEAKER_01: And what would you say about do you use Manage My Experiments on Amazon?
- 24:37SPEAKER_01: Do you end up using that tool?
- 24:39SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 24:39SPEAKER_00: So what I love about manage my experiments is that we don't have to worry about flat files failing.
- 24:44SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the other tools that are out there, it really relies on the Amazon taking that change.
- 24:49SPEAKER_00: And even with brand registry, you know, 50-50 shot, maybe if you're lucky, right?
- 24:53SPEAKER_00: So it cycles through.
- 24:54SPEAKER_00: So you don't have to worry as much about, you know, we talked about like the seasonality of like, you know, because let's say I just change my title, I let it run for two or three weeks because I don't want to deal with the longer period of Manage My Experiments.
- 25:05SPEAKER_00: That longer period is there for a reason.
- 25:07SPEAKER_00: But let's just say that I want to do three weeks and then I do the next three weeks.
- 25:11SPEAKER_00: It's not possible for me to know if a micro influencer posted about my product, Kim Kardashian, it was like in the corner of her screen in the back, something that might not have registered as a social mention, but influenced the results.
- 25:24SPEAKER_00: So with Manage My Experiments, I feel like you get a little bit of a clearer data set.
- 25:28SPEAKER_00: You can run it without that by either just looking into your detailed sales and traffic report, your ad conversion, those kinds of things over a period.
- 25:35SPEAKER_00: I would recommend that you do off on, off on.
- 25:38SPEAKER_00: So rather than Title One for three weeks, title two for three weeks, I would do title one for three weeks, title two for three weeks, title one for three weeks, title two for three weeks.
- 25:46SPEAKER_00: If your product is not super seasonal to try to get some more feedback in there.
- 25:51SPEAKER_00: There are tools like SEM Rush has an A-B testing tool that I believe is still free as part of their, I think they're calling it sellerly these days, suite.
- 26:00SPEAKER_00: But I think the biggest thing is you don't have to use those tools because Manage My Experiment's not available for every A SIN.
- 26:06SPEAKER_00: If it doesn't have enough volume where they think they can give you a statistically significant data set, they won't let you run the experiment.
- 26:13SPEAKER_00: So the thing is, if it's not eligible for that, so you want to take the results with a grain of salt.
- 26:19SPEAKER_00: Because what they might be saying is, even if we ran this for six weeks, you're not getting enough traffic and conversion for us to be able to say this is a conclusive version of what is the better option.
- 26:31SPEAKER_00: So if you are only getting 10 views a day or page views a day, then even if you ran it for six weeks, you're not going to have it one or two people a day could significantly skew your results, especially if your mom is checking in on your results, or maybe your CEO is coming in and checking to see which title is live.
- 26:51SPEAKER_00: All of those things can start to skew your data.
- 26:54SPEAKER_00: So if you don't have that data set, you can still run A B testing, but you need to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt and you need to be looking at those results with a little bit more of a critical eye.
- 27:04SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like you can kind of use like, oh, my conversion rate is high, my conversion rate is low, but you have to also look at the common sense things around it.
- 27:11SPEAKER_00: Is there something else that's affecting my conversion rate?
- 27:14SPEAKER_00: My main competitor who's exactly the same, same mold as me, selling for 20% less and advertising on my product detail page in four different locations.
- 27:22SPEAKER_00: So people are leaving to go purchase that product that is pretty much exactly the same at a lower price.
- 27:28SPEAKER_00: Because there's nothing that you can change the title, but you're still going to have that leakage and conversion.
- 27:32SPEAKER_01: And what would be a good number to be statistically significant A-B tests on a per day basis?
- 27:39SPEAKER_01: Is it like a hundred views per day?
- 27:41SPEAKER_01: Like what would that be a good number as a basis?
- 27:44SPEAKER_01: If you're doing like a standard, like two-week, uh standard two or three-week test and you just launched a product and you're A B testing what's going to work, you have to know like how many views would be like a good number, like a good, like a vague kind of baseline.
- 27:59SPEAKER_01: And I'm just curious what your thoughts are would be on that.
- 28:01SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, I'm almost wondering because I'm afraid if I say like you need this many views, then I try to think of like how people are going to interpret that.
- 28:08SPEAKER_00: They're going to say, Great, I just need to run more ads to get more views to make it statistically significant.
- 28:13SPEAKER_00: The problem is then now if you've changed your ads as you're changing this, now you've changed two variables, you're not testing one variable anymore.
- 28:19SPEAKER_00: So you could have widened the target so much that you have keywords that are not going to convert that are driving non-converting views.
- 28:25SPEAKER_00: So I would say, I mean, at least 10 conversions a day would be a good place to start.
- 28:31SPEAKER_00: If you're not getting at least 10 conversions, and I would, you know, then I don't think you're going to have enough data to be able to even see anything.
- 28:39SPEAKER_00: Obviously, we I would probably prefer it to be closer to 30 to 100 conversions a day, but that's not feasible for all brands.
- 28:46SPEAKER_00: And just because it's not statistically significant doesn't mean it's wrong.
- 28:50SPEAKER_00: It just means you're going to need to revisit that testing more often to make sure it wasn't an anomaly.
- 28:55SPEAKER_00: So, like we had a product recently that they are a knockoff of a luxury fashion product.
- 29:01SPEAKER_00: And they're the same exact quality, but they've figured out how to do it more affordably.
- 29:05SPEAKER_00: They've developed a really great brand behind it.
- 29:07SPEAKER_00: So it's not just like a Chinese knockoff.
- 29:08SPEAKER_00: They've developed a really beautiful, wonderful brand around this product.
- 29:12SPEAKER_00: Because they were trying to show that they were the more affordable version of this at the same quality, they had it priced about half of that main target.
- 29:19SPEAKER_00: What we did is we A-B tested raising the price.
- 29:22SPEAKER_00: And so we raised the price and the conversion rates didn't drop.
- 29:25SPEAKER_00: In fact, revenue went up, you know, sales went up.
- 29:28SPEAKER_00: So we tested it again.
- 29:29SPEAKER_00: We raised the price up and things seemed like they were going really well.
- 29:32SPEAKER_00: But then we started to notice that conversion rates and sales were coming down.
- 29:35SPEAKER_00: And so we started to rerunning those pricing elasticity tests that we were running as like a, you know, A B test to identify whether or not something is shifted in the marketplace, or if it's something that that maybe that A B testing was artificially propped up by some other coverage or influencer marketing that they had going on because they didn't have that, you know, they were at about like 12 conversions a day when we were running this test because it's a very high-end product.
- 30:02SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't mean that the testing was wrong, but it does mean that if there's a discrepancy, we need to go back and retest it again.
- 30:09SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that makes any sense.
- 30:10SPEAKER_01: That does.
- 30:11SPEAKER_01: That makes perfect sense.
- 30:12SPEAKER_01: And what makes you decide to A B test a new title?
- 30:17SPEAKER_01: And do you have any examples with that?
- 30:18SPEAKER_01: I know we touched on titles a little bit, but I wanted to kind of like get specific examples on what you would test in a title to basically make it more efficient for them.
- 30:28SPEAKER_00: So the first thing we're gonna look at how their ads, what their click-through rate and what their conversion rate is on their ads.
- 30:35SPEAKER_00: And what we want to see is when we're looking, especially if they have a you know a wider mix, you know, has that drop?
- 30:43SPEAKER_00: Or is it something that is below what we see is, you know, and within our agency is kind of like an average for that category, and it really does vary pretty widely.
- 30:51SPEAKER_00: And so if we see that, what we'll do, that will trigger us to run that A-B test.
- 30:55SPEAKER_00: Usually what we're going to look at is what are the keyword phrases that we're most focused on trying to rank for?
- 31:01SPEAKER_00: Um, when we're looking at sponsored products, we're looking at trying to focus on increasing organic results.
- 31:06SPEAKER_00: We focus a lot on tacos, you know, trying to impact the organic sales with the advertising so that you're not stuck on that incremental advertising path forever.
- 31:14SPEAKER_00: And so if we probably refocus it to, you know, we take one of the most important keywords that we feel is driving a majority of sales for a competitor, and we're going to re-jigger our title so that an exact match for that keyword phrase is in the title.
- 31:28SPEAKER_00: And then we'll also, if a title is longer, we will test shortening it or clarifying and cons making it more concise.
- 31:34SPEAKER_00: If a cusp if a client's new to us, then usually we are going to uh rework the title and then track the data over time to make sure that the changes that we made to the title are effective, if that makes sense.
- 31:45SPEAKER_01: That's great.
- 31:46SPEAKER_01: And do you find that these tests make a big difference in overall sales on Amazon?
- 31:51SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 31:51SPEAKER_00: So we had a product recently that it's a luxury home good product.
- 31:55SPEAKER_00: It's about a hundred dollar product.
- 31:56SPEAKER_00: And the title of it, so let's say that it was a product like a shower curtain.
- 32:01SPEAKER_00: Obviously, it's not a shower curtain because no shower curtain is a hundred dollars.
- 32:04SPEAKER_00: Or if it is, I want to market your product because if you're successfully selling a hundred dollar shower curtain, that's pretty awesome.
- 32:09SPEAKER_00: Um but it's something along those lines.
- 32:10SPEAKER_00: And by changing the order of the words in the title, so before it said it wouldn't say antibacterial shower curtain because obviously you can't say antibacterial, but let's say it was said antibacterial shower curtain.
- 32:21SPEAKER_00: Now I'd say shower curtain for reduced mold, or you know, it's like it changed the words.
- 32:26SPEAKER_00: So it was a three-word phrase, and we changed the order of them and it allowed them to take the organic position for that important keyword phrase that was driving a lot of sales for their competitors, and it increased their organic sales by 20% and it has whole held that.
- 32:41SPEAKER_00: And they were already the six-figure a month brand.
- 32:44SPEAKER_00: So they were able to hold that.
- 32:45SPEAKER_00: So it was a pretty significant increase for a long period of time.
- 32:49SPEAKER_00: You know, we're seeing that that's holding.
- 32:50SPEAKER_00: We've seen that over multiple brands that sometimes making a small change to help people either identify that it's the right product for them, and in this case, changing the order made it more clear what the product really was.
- 33:03SPEAKER_00: And so by changing the order, even the, and this is something where it kind of went out, the brand said that's not how we describe our product.
- 33:09SPEAKER_00: We describe our product like this.
- 33:10SPEAKER_00: And we said, right, but there's more search volume for this.
- 33:13SPEAKER_00: This is what your key competitors are converting for.
- 33:15SPEAKER_00: So we had the receipts to show that this would be the better option.
- 33:19SPEAKER_00: So they allowed us to go outside of their brand guidelines to test this, and we saw that it did make a significant increase.
- 33:25SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
- 33:26SPEAKER_01: And there, is there anything else that when you see other sellers doing wrong when it comes to A-B testing on Amazon?
- 33:32SPEAKER_00: The biggest thing is trying to test every so there aren't times in place where you just say, look, like my dog made a better Amazon listing.
- 33:39SPEAKER_00: I know you did your best and it was a good effort, and Amazon is so weird and you did nothing wrong.
- 33:44SPEAKER_00: This would have been good in Google, it's just not good for here.
- 33:46SPEAKER_00: There are times where we say, let's scrap it all and let's start over.
- 33:49SPEAKER_00: Sometimes what I see, especially if a brand is maybe getting a little cash flow tight or their ad costs have jumped up.
- 33:55SPEAKER_00: And we're seeing some ad costs jump up, and it's a lot of is not just one thing.
- 33:59SPEAKER_00: The economy is tightening and there's a bunch of disruption happening over at Meta and Google that's changing the way those ads are performing.
- 34:06SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of brands are shifting their ad budget.
- 34:09SPEAKER_00: So it's not just that one thing.
- 34:11SPEAKER_00: And then we're seeing that some of the categories, like baby, the category impressions are down overall.
- 34:17SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of things, there's a lot of pressure being put on these ads.
- 34:21SPEAKER_00: Now, going back to your original question, the reason I say that is sometimes if a brand is getting cash strapped or they're worried about getting cash strapped, then they'll say, we need to test a whole bunch of things all at once.
- 34:29SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna test all of these things.
- 34:31SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the problem with that.
- 34:32SPEAKER_00: If we want to say, okay, we understand that there's some negatives to testing everything at once, but we feel like a drastic measure is gonna need to be happening or we're not going to make it, then that's okay.
- 34:42SPEAKER_00: But you need to know the caveat or the thing that the pitfall in that is if you change the title and the bullet and the primary image and your video ads and your call-outs all at the same time, it might be that your title increased conversion 5% and the video decreased impressions 20%.
- 35:00SPEAKER_00: And you know, like there's just too many variables, the data is gonna be muddy.
- 35:04SPEAKER_00: And so you'll have changed all these things, and at the end, you won't have any idea really what made the difference.
- 35:10SPEAKER_00: Now, on the ads, you'll be able to see the ad data and you'll be able to see some impression things, but it will be hard for you to identify whether or not a specific change actually changed the bottom line.
- 35:19SPEAKER_00: And so what can happen is you kind of spiral into this let me make reactionary changes or let me um launch a bunch of products to try to fix the problem of not having enough sales, which always makes it worse.
- 35:33SPEAKER_00: I know it seems counterintuitive, but if you have an oil diffuser and it's doing well but it's struggling, and then you launch three oil diffusers to go with it, guess what just happened to your category?
- 35:42SPEAKER_00: You now have three new competitors that are you.
- 35:44SPEAKER_00: So you're making it even harder for you to focus on you're spending a lot of ad spend to try to launch these.
- 35:49SPEAKER_00: So, you know, like as you're A-B testing, you want to consider, you know, are you making reactionary moves or is there a strategy to it?
- 35:57SPEAKER_00: And are you accidentally causing things that are gonna cause the data to be inaccurate?
- 36:01SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes when we're looking at year over year sales, we say, oh, it dropped.
- 36:05SPEAKER_00: Well, we're not really looking at the fact that three major competitors that have now to take spots for your most important keywords showed up 12 months ago.
- 36:13SPEAKER_00: So now when we look at year over year, it looks like you're down, but it's really because you've allowed these other competitors to take those top spots.
- 36:21SPEAKER_00: And you have to either invest to get those spots back, or you need to find another way to get to the top, or you need to let that product go and focus and keep your remaining products up at the top.
- 36:30SPEAKER_01: And is there anything else that's really been top of mind is saying, hey, like I've been wanting to communicate this?
- 36:36SPEAKER_00: So people will say, I don't know why product is not selling.
- 36:39SPEAKER_00: It's a good product because your product not selling does not mean it's not a good product.
- 36:43SPEAKER_00: It means that Amazon's algorithm doesn't feel like you're the best option, right?
- 36:47SPEAKER_00: And they're going off of what puts money in their pockets.
- 36:50SPEAKER_00: So what got you here will not get you there.
- 36:54SPEAKER_00: So you might have had a level of success launching a lot of products, bringing in a lot of things from China.
- 36:59SPEAKER_00: Now, especially because money has gotten so expensive, you need to really, really be thinking about your product mix.
- 37:05SPEAKER_00: I think the biggest thing that people need to be thinking about is cash flow, potentially reducing your product mix so that you have more capital, increasing your margins on your best-selling, highest margin items, focusing on taking and holding those organic positions and having some defensive strategy to drive up terms on your competitors so that you do not invite new competitors into your space, but really watching your margins and being willing to let products go if that market is now saturated.
- 37:34SPEAKER_00: There are other platforms to sell those products, and you might want to look at a local market as well.
- 37:40SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we look at the sunk cost of that inventory and we say, we just got to make it move, we just gotta make it move.
- 37:45SPEAKER_00: When in reality, if you have this group of products that are not doing well and this group of products that are doing well, these are just sucking up your cash.
- 37:52SPEAKER_00: And now more than ever, that's dangerous.
- 37:54SPEAKER_00: So it would be better to go get as much as you can for those move them the best they can.
- 37:58SPEAKER_00: Focus your advertising dollar, your ad strategy, your agency hours, whatever it is, on the products that are doing well and continue to optimize them.
- 38:07SPEAKER_00: Work on increasing your margins.
- 38:08SPEAKER_00: You can A B test until your titles are kind of maxing out the conversion rate on your ads.
- 38:13SPEAKER_00: Over time, that has a really great ROI.
- 38:16SPEAKER_00: And you really do need to invest in creative now.
- 38:19SPEAKER_00: I know we lived for 10 years on iPhone photos, but now you even if you're using iPhone photos, you need to get somebody who's good at Photoshop to Photoshop those things.
- 38:27SPEAKER_00: Really look at lighting.
- 38:29SPEAKER_00: Have somebody with an aesthetic eye looking at your product, especially if your product is a decoration, has any sort of aesthetic value, you need to be speaking that in your primary images.
- 38:39SPEAKER_00: The spaces are just too crowded for sloppy work.
- 38:42SPEAKER_00: So I would say less is more, laser, not flashlight.
- 38:46SPEAKER_00: And that goes to keywords, that goes to your ad campaigns, you know, really focusing in on the products that work.
- 38:51SPEAKER_00: And then once you do that, you then you have the cash flow to expand out profitably.
- 38:55SPEAKER_00: We had a company that came to us that was like, this one product is the only product we think is really viable on Amazon.
- 39:00SPEAKER_00: And they thought they could do a million in just that one product.
- 39:03SPEAKER_00: We focused on that product the first year, and then the second year, we expanded out like an additional 12 products.
- 39:09SPEAKER_00: And then this last year we focused on an additional 24.
- 39:12SPEAKER_00: And because we were focused on just launching and funneling everything instead of focusing on their entire product mix, which is over 400 SKUs, they have grown so much.
- 39:21SPEAKER_00: I mean, like rocket ship growth on Amazon year over year, consistently, because they're making sure that they're not wasting ad spend on products that are not going to perform to try to recoup their costs.
- 39:34SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's amazing.
- 39:35SPEAKER_01: And I know we can go on for this for seven more hours, but that's all we have time for today, unfortunately.
- 39:40SPEAKER_01: Robin, please tell the audience how to find you and how to find more about your business.
- 39:45SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so you can go to Marketplace Blueprint, all one word, marketplaceblueprint.com forward slash show, and you can follow me there on social.
- 39:54SPEAKER_00: And then I also have a link to like a listing optimization guide.
- 39:57SPEAKER_00: Make sure at least you've got your four corners of, you know, like the fundamentals of your house built with those strong listings.
- 40:02SPEAKER_00: And then you can go back and A B test your creatives to make sure that you're bringing in the right customer.
- 40:08SPEAKER_00: And then don't be afraid to go through those reviews of yours and your competitors to really hone in on what is working and what are your customers really love and hate.
- 40:16SPEAKER_00: And you use that not only in your advertising and your marketing, but also as you're looking at new product development and version control.
- 40:23SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
- 40:23SPEAKER_01: Robin, thank you so much for joining.
- 40:25SPEAKER_01: Thank you everyone for watching.
- 40:27SPEAKER_01: This is Selling on Giants, the e commerce marketplace show.
- 40:29SPEAKER_01: We'll catch you next time.