Why Amazon Ads Stop Scaling (And It’s Not Your Budget)

I'm Jason Landro, one of the founders of Nectar 1. We're a digital marketing agency who focus on Amazon Marketplaces 1. We do everything from creative to marketplace management, advertising, retail media 1. Excuse me, we build websites and do all the digital marketing surrounding that 1. And we have an analytics platform just around called Idra surrounding Amazon to be used to measure incrementality and find new revenue opportunities 1. And so what we are talking about today 1. today 1. So as part of our business, we do a lot of advertising audits 1.

And we tend to see the same problems pop up over and over again 2. And most of the budgets that we audit are between about anywhere from $500 a year to tens of millions of dollars a year 2. So it is a wide range, but they're kind of healthy budgets 2. And we see these same common issues, I would say on 90 plus percent of these audits 2. So we're going to dive into them today 2. What you should expect to take out of today is tools you can go back to your business and audit, or at least start to look for these areas and see if there's room for improvement 2, 3.

So we're hoping that our expectation is that you find this webinar to be very practical 3. So our guest today is Harriet Carson, and I'm going to let her introduce herself 3. Hello, and thanks for joining 3. I'm Harriet Carson, the VP of advertising at Nectar 3. I've spent really over the past decade building and scaling Amazon teams and programs across sponsored ads, DSP, as well as Amazon Marketing Cloud, which we'll get into 3. I still have a background in broader digital marketing as well as operations that allows me to really connect Amazon into a full funnel on my channel strategy, as it should never really live in silo 3, 4.

Nectar works across most major verticals and business models 4. And while every brand has its own category dynamics and competitive set and growth goals, there is a consistent set of foundational principles that really drive performance on Amazon 4. Today's session is focused on those core tactics 4. They're really the building blocks that we see behind the strongest, most scalable Amazon programs and marketing plans and the levers that unlock incremental sustainable growth 4.

So I look forward to just running through all of these with you 5. All right, so we're going to dive right in 5. These are the top 10 kind of areas that we see are common issues, so to speak 5. One, waste that's been so that's spend without sales 5. Everyone's generally aware of this 5. I think people get lost sometimes in the nuance 5. And we're going to get in today that really the biggest mess here is about philosophy in terms of how you're setting up your campaigns to minimize waste that's been in the first place 5.

Leveraging search query performance report to stop cannibalizing your organic sales 6. So measuring your branded purchase share and the impact of your advertising on your branded purchase share, bleeding more into exact match 6. As your account matures, you should know what keywords work and your advertising foundational setup should be aligned to that as opposed to spending a lot of money and broad and phrase or auto 6. Optimizing your ad format mix 6. So not just being in sponsored products but diversifying out of that depending on your category and budget and the depth of your portfolio 6, 7.

Leveraging AMC audience and insights 7. It's crazy to me that so many brands still are not using AMC 7. Yes, there are advanced ways to use it, but there's a lot of simple ways to use AMC 7. The brands are not capitalizing on it's a huge mess 7. Implementing product targeting and conquesting this one still gets me 7. We presented it yesterday for an account spending over $5 million a year that really was leveraging product targeting and conquesting properly 7, 8.

And then almost no one is immune to it 8. It's low hanging fruit 8. Roaz we have moved away from Roaz being the North Star yet because of the amount of data that Amazon provides and really a lot of marketplaces provide yet there's still a lot of brands that are anchoring to Roaz and or in this case, ACOS 8. It's not the right KPI anymore 8. Segmenting campaigns by goals 8. There shouldn't be mixing branded or non branded 8. That's simple 8. But what about, you know, we we've see companies place top of search modifiers in campaigns that are not dedicated to top of search 8.

You start to really muddy the waters 9. So just a couple of examples improving your conversion rate 9. Advertising is the lever to send traffic 9. It's it doesn't convert consumers 9. So your PDPs have to be retail ready 9. It's not just about sending traffic and then building a year round strategy 9. Obviously, it's differs for every company, but you need to really plan ahead and think about how to allocate your budget and what's going to work and what's not going to work to really map that out appropriately 9. So with that, we're going to dive in to each one of these topics 9.

So I see there's already some questions 10. It's great 10. As we go through this, let us know if you have more, we'll make sure to keep these top of mind and dive in 10. So first eliminating wasted ad spend 10. Harry, what do we typically see here? 10 Yeah, so, you know, one of the most consistent patterns that we see when brands really start to hit a plateau is not actually always a lack of budget 10. It's misallocated spend 10. I, you know, I frequently say it's not always about spending more sometimes it is, but it's about spending smarter than the competition and really more effectively and efficiently across almost every single audit that we run 10, 11.

We find a meaningful percentage of spend going towards search terms or product targets that just have never converted and in some accounts that numbers 20% in others it's much higher 11. This usually comes from over reliance on broad match and auto campaigns without strong guardrails 11. I'm not against discovery tactics 11. They're important 11. They help, you know, surface new demand, but they should operate as controlled environments as harvesting campaigns 11.

Once a search term or a product targets proves that it's a winning term that converts, you should be moving that into exact match 12. Broad stroke targeting should be used to capture anything missing in your manual or exact match campaigns 12. Discovery can inform strategy, not, you know, consume the majority of your scaling budget 12. So, you know, that's not to say that we at Nectar don't have any ways to spend, you know, typically our accounts see around five to 8% as we're testing in an account and, you know, testing that new terms are launching new products that can fluctuate 12, 13.

But we have pretty tight guardrails and automation around to minimize this 13. What we focus on is separating exploration from monetization, right 13. So, discovery campaigns have clear rules, zero conversion, look back rules, aggressive negatives, harvesting routines, then proven search terms graduate really in controlled exact match environments where we can scale them intentionally 13. This significantly reduces your wasted spend 13. There's a lot of the times that I'm doing audits and there's 70% of your terms aren't converting only 2% of exact matches and then it's like 90% in broad 13, 14.

So reclaiming wasted spend, it really enables incremental growth without requiring additional budget 14. You simply reallocate towards areas that are already demonstrating purchase intent 14. That structural discipline alone can really unlock immediate efficiency and incremental growth 14. And then I see that LT asked a question around I think it's key to waste to break down wasted spend to buckets of spend that is not returning results plus spend that is just not as sufficient level to see results 14, 15.

We'd love more tips for driving the move away from Rowe 15. We're going to get into the moving away from Rowe as a North North star in the next couple of slides 15. But yeah, wasted spend 15. You know how I look at it is typically the best way to look at it is you can look at it as a whole of anything that's not converting and there's different look back periods 15. Like if you look at the past seven days, it's probably too short of a look back period to really know if a term is going to convert 15. You should at least do like a 60 day look back period to see if some things typically wasted spend 15, 16.

Also, if you're a higher price point or more premium product, it might take more clicks to get a conversion 16. So you're going to want to put a click threshold 16. So typically across all of our accounts 16. And again, this can change, but the average is every 10 clicks at minimum should lead to a conversion 16. So that's a good place to start in terms of rules 16. And if you're implementing automated rules to eliminate wasted spend, you can start with something as 10 clicks and no conversion in the past 30 days reduce beds by 50% 16, 17.

And then two weeks later, if they still have no conversions, then you can pause it 17. And I think that it's important to note that you don't always have to pause a keyword 17. If you're leveraging like phrase match or exact match, you can just negate the search term 17. If the search term that's resulting from the keyword that you're targeting because of the match type is irrelevant to your brand 17. Sorry, struggling to unmute 17. I think also it's not so much about buckets of spend 17. And I think what Harriet actually mentioned on the call the other day, so I'm stealing her thunder here is as we go deeper and look at consumers that just click and don't buy 17, 18.

And then if we retarget them, are they purchasing the purchase rate at which we do using AMC, the purchase rate is really low, like 10% or less 18. So ultimately that that spend is not efficient 18. In other words, even though we know that consumers often don't just click once and buy, as you start to look at this wasted spend and trend out whether consumers are coming back and buying it, you see that they aren't 18, 19.

So, you know, really, it, it, which makes sense because you should know what terms are proven, which is why exact is so efficient and be funneling in consumers there and having limited budget for discovery 19. And then instead focusing on reaching more consumers who are in aisle in market or focusing on generating more demand for your brand, as opposed to trying to expand on tangential keywords 19. BLANK_AUDIO 19. So kind of moving to the next point, which is ensuring that you're not cannibalizing organic sales 19, 20.

This is an area where Amazon provides a lot of data through the search query performance report 20. And Harry's gonna go in and explain that 20. We see that a lot of brands, agencies talk about cannibalization as though it's a feeling, the wave that you have to balance and ride based on intuition and experience, and that's not true 20. There's data that Amazon provides in brand analytics that you can leverage to determine this with pretty good precision 20. Yes, so Harry, do you wanna dive in and explain that with us? 20

• Yes, search query performance 21. It's one of my favorite topics 21. For anyone who doesn't know, this is a report, like Jason said, within brand analytics 21. It came out, I believe, in November of last year, so it's still relatively new, and, or sorry, beginning of last year 21. And it was only released for three P brands 21. Amazon is slowly rolling this out for one P brands 21. So if you haven't seen it, it should be available soon 21. In my opinion, it's the most powerful data Amazon has released since Amazon Marketing Cloud 21.

And I actually think my new favorite is the reporting beta, which will likely have a separate webinar on 22. But search query performance, essentially what it does is you can see on a brand level and on a product level all of your impression metrics, click metrics, and your share on a weekly basis, monthly or quarterly 22. So you can get down to the search term level and you can really see what's your impression share, what's your click share, what's your add to cart share, what's your purchase share, which is an indicator of market share, right? 22

Purchase share would be, say, it's the term coffee 23. Every week out of everyone typing in the term coffee, what percentage of users are buying from your brand versus competitors 23. So search query performance, it fundamentally really changes how we think about Amazon strategy 23. Instead of looking at campaign level performance, we look at demand and share at the query and the product level 23. It also gives you search volume, like true search volume and not just search frequency rank 23. So it unlocks that data 23. That shift is really important because it moves us away from optimizing metrics and towards understanding market position 23, 24.

We're also able to really tie together the relationship between paid and organic, which historically has been very, very difficult on Amazon 24. With this data, we get to unlock trends around your brand's position in the category, where your brand's winning, where there's opportunity for growth and to invest 24. We typically analyze three things in search query performance 24. First, where do we already have strong purchase share? 24 For example, this is great for branded terms 24.

Like if we're already dominating a branded term and we're winning like 99% of the purchase share, continuing to pour incremental dollars into those branded terms rarely is gonna drive any meaningful growth 25. It's an opportunity to really shift dollars into non-branded, scale back branded spend and drive net new sales 25. Then what you can do is you can understand how much investment you should be spending on branded terms based on how that purchase share is moving 25. So if you're spending $100,000 a week on branded terms and your brand purchase share is 99%, then you cut that spend to 50% the next week and your brand purchase share moves from 99% to 98% 25, 26.

It's a very minimal decrease, meaning that competitors were, when people were typing in your brand, competitors were getting 1% of those purchases, now it's two, it depends on the volume 26. Search-grade performance allows you to see how many purchases actually, total purchases come from that term, but typically that like 50K that I just mentioned is gonna go a lot further targeting net new terms or targeting category terms to drive incremental growth 26, 27.

If someone's typing in your brand name, they're likely buying from you, they're specifically looking for you 27. Every brand is different though, based off your price, your competition, the size of your brand, and also if you're investing a lot of dollars in external marketing, you wanna make sure that you have coverage on Amazon because you are paying for that branded search somewhere, even if it's not in the Amazon ecosystem 27. So, it's not a one size fits all and that's why this data is so valuable 27.

There is a science to it and you can really understand your sweet spot and test different spend levels and see how that impacts your total share for brand 28. The second thing we really look at is where is search volume high, but our impression share is low, but we also have a decent purchase rate 28. This is often a very clear exposure gap and it identifies where we could be leaning in to untapped opportunities, where we could be gaining more share invisibility 28. And then third thing that we're mainly looking at is where are we getting impressions, but failing to capture purchase share 28, 29.

That usually indicates a conversation around conversions or the foundation's not being right or it's tied to pricing reviews or PDP quality 29. Another goal isn't to chase every query, it's to identify where incremental share gains can really materially move revenue and then search query performance helps us avoid really paying for sales that we would have captured organically anyways and instead focus investment where we're under penetrated relatives to real demand 29. - Yeah, I think one of the challenges brands face with this data is that it can be hard to harness 29, 30.

And what I mean by that is the output in Amazon is not as clean as it is in our internal dashboards 30. That being said, we're not the only company that has this data trended and categorized, so there's lots of other options out there too 30. You can put it together manually, you can download it and put it together 30. But I think my suspicion is that a lot of brands aren't utilizing this data because they're not compiling it in a way to be able to track these metrics 30.

But if you have to invest, if you're spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on branded search, and it's not incremental, spending one, two, $3,000 a month on a tool is well worth it because you should be able to measure what amount is truly incremental and then reallocate the rest in non-branded category terms 31. But that's not the only use of this data that's just one use of it 31. So I would challenge brands and agencies to think about how can they actually leverage this data to grow incrementally as opposed to just focusing on a row as number for a keyword or a campaign 31, 32.

• You do a lot really valuable data, but they make it a little bit difficult to trend over time 32. So what we've allowed to do there is, you can kind of see in the charts, they're a little small, but we're overlaying spend with all of your key metrics in search query performance 32. So we have it in chart or we have a multi-line graph where we're comparing the relationship between spend and then that search query data 32. And then you can see there's a dropdown metric 32.

These are just some, not all of the metrics that are available in search query performance, but you get search volume, brand share, your brand conversion rate versus the category conversion rate 33. So how are you converting compared to the competitors? 33 You get like median price of a product versus your ASP 33. So it's pretty granular 33. You really get to unlock a lot of insights that we weren't able to see otherwise 33. And if anyone on this webinar is familiar with brand analytics and you're on vendor, you probably know that there's a top search term report where you can only see click, your click share and your conversion share in a search term level 33, 34.

If you're a top, if you're in the top three clicked products, this allows you to get past that and doesn't matter how much share you own, you could be the 100th top to click product and you still get your share data 34. - There's a lot here we could probably spend most of our time just talking about search query performance data and how you can use it 34. Maybe that should be a several webinar 34. But we're gonna go on to the next topic which is shifting your strategy to exact match 34, 35.

I know this is one of Harriet's favorites 35. So I'll let her walk through it 35. - Yeah, so exact match is often, I think it's often misunderstood 35. It's not conservative, it's strategic in my opinion 35. Once a search term has really proven that it can drive conversions, it deserves its own environment, right? 35 That gives us full control over bids, budgets, placement strategies really at the search term level 35. We know what the top terms in each category are 35. We just showed you in search query performance 35.

We have all of the historical data to see where you've converted both organically and from ads on a product level 36. And we also know who your top competitors are 36. So use it, right? 36 Don't rely on Amazon's algorithms to determine where your ads are being placed 'cause it creates inefficiencies 36. And then there's a lot of things you can also do with exact match to make sure that you're not just doing exact match, but you're overlaying more advanced strategies on top 36. So we strongly believe in isolating top performing keywords and in some cases into their own campaigns or tightly structured exact environments 36, 37.

That allows us to really scale winners without interference from broader targeting types or competing for budgets 37. You can also only see placement performance on a campaign level 37. I think that might have changed with the reporting beta 37. Prior to like a month ago, you could though, where if you have a single ace in one campaign, then you can see if it's performing best on top of search, rest of search, or product detail pages, and then you can manipulate your bids and your top of search and product pages, bid adjustments to make sure that you're essentially showing up where you're reaching the highest intent people to purchase 37, 38.

There's also a compounding organic benefit 38. When you're using exact match, when you constantly win auctions on high intent queries, your organic rank does start to strengthen that creates a flywheel effect, discovery surfaces opportunity, and exact match really scales opportunity 38. And over time, that structure makes performance far more predictable and far less volatile 38, 39.

We always say ads exist to propel your organic growth, which is why we don't recommend using row ads as a North Star which we'll get into 39. But the goal of ads is really to increase your organic rank so that your total sales are increasing and your organic sales are increasing 39. And exact match is a way to do that by just having complete control over your strategy 39. I still recommend using some phrase and some auto for net new term and discovery campaigns, but the majority of my keyword targettings typically gonna be exact match because we have the data to know what we should be targeting, like I said 39, 40.

• Yeah, and I think this one is often can be uncomfortable for brands 40. But as you start to look at the data, it's very consistent 40. We see that and then we went over the wasted spend that exact match typically has the least wasted spend 40. The broad match and auto tend to have the most and there's a reason for that 40. And so you don't, you know, as your account matures, you don't need to be doing a ton of discovery 40.

You have all this reporting from Amazon that shows you what is working and what isn't working at a keyword and target level 41. And so it's about leveraging that data, targeting those terms or targets specifically and then limiting your budget on discovery 41. Obviously new products come on or do trends happen 41. And you want to have the mechanisms to be able to discover them, but it should be a small portion of your budget and then you can scale up exact accordingly 41. You know, and if you're in a place where you want to create more demand, it's not about taking a shotgun approach with broad, rather, that's what you should be doing through the DSP and generating that type of funnel awareness 41, 42.

So moving to the next one, which is optimizing your ad format mix 42. I think, Kari, we've seen that brands have definitely matured here, but there's still a lot of room to go, right? 42 Yeah, I think that, you know, Amazon's evolving 42. It seems like almost, you know, every couple of weeks they're coming out with a new feature 42. And, you know, even like three or four years ago, you could almost get away with just doing search now, you know, there's a big emphasis on creative and upper funnel 42, 43.

And, you know, if you're not paying attention to upper funnel or you're not activating it, some brands aren't ready for it, I will say 43. Most brands should be doing something there because it's going to help the longevity of your brand and increase long-term growth 43. But, you know, every ad format on Amazon, it really plays a different role in the customer journey 43. So sponsored products primarily captures demand that already exists 43.

Brands and sponsored brand video influence consideration and reinforce brand positioning 44. You also get some premium placements there and with video, the goal is typically to, you know, engage customers 44. And then DSP expands reach and allows us to really shape demand earlier in the funnel, really builds the funnel 44. When brands over index on a single format, they eventually hit a ceiling 44. So if you rely only on sponsored products, you're limited by existing search volume 44. If you rely only on DSP without strong search coverage, you may create awareness, but fail to convert because people can't find you 44, 45.

So they need to be, you need to really have a cohesive strategy and an ideal marketing mix 45. I've done a lot of audits where people aren't, you know, brands aren't running any sponsored brands or any sponsored display 45. And typically when consumers are exposed to multiple different ad types, whether it's sponsored display and sponsored products or sponsored products in DSP, the purchase rate is higher 45. So you know, we think in terms of layering, so capture existing demand, influence shoppers, evaluating options, and then create demand earlier in the journey 45, 46.

And then track this all through Amazon marketing cloud, which we'll get into the, you know, the optimal mix 46. It differs by category and by your market position, but a diversified, really ad format and strategy consistently supports this durable growth 46. And you're able to track it through AMDC to see how incremental your spend is at every level of the funnel with every campaign type and how they work together to drive convergence 46.

Yeah, I think a lot of this is about also testing, right, and being willing to fail or not have it be perfect 47. It doesn't mean you have to overcomment from your budget perspective 47. Go ahead 47. I'll also say I noticed a lot, I noticed a lot in audits that if something is working really, really well on one ad type like sponsored products, tested on sponsored brands and sponsored brand videos, if you have the assets, more than more times than not, when I'm doing an audit, some of the top converting terms either on sponsored brands or sponsored products, they're not being tested on the other formats and you should be going after those terms on both if they're proven conversions 47, 48.

All right, so moving to number five, leveraging AMC audiences and insights is a really hot topic 48. MC is kind of relatively new in terms of being rolled out universally and in console, but we're still seeing a lot of brands not using it today and agencies 48. Yeah 48. You know, Amazon marketing cloud, it really changes how we approach strategy 48. Because it gives us behavioral visibility beyond standard reporting and essentially is a clean room of data 48, 49.

There is templated queries and custom queries using SQL 49. It used to all be SQL when it was released in 2019, but it's actually extremely user-friendly now 49. I think, you know, I think Amazon marketing cloud, it can come off as intimidating, but it's really, really valuable 49. And with templated queries, it's pretty self-explanatory to run 49. It's also in the ads console today now, so it's very easy to access 49. If you have an ads account, even if you're not running DSP, you have access to all of these audiences and all of these additional measurement reports that are templated 49, 50.

So what it does is it really allows us to analyze how shoppers move through exposure paths and what combination of ad types actually lead to purchase 50. You know, we use AMC to build custom audiences based on meaningful signals to write 50. They just, Amazon just released AMC audiences where you can target prior viewers or high value customers, abandoned cart customers, users who, you know, viewed your storefront and didn't purchase, can target lapsed customers up to the last five years or past subscribe and save customers that have dropped off or shoppers exposed to, you know, specific ad types 50, 51.

The list really like goes on and on 51. There's so many different tactical use cases that come into play here and it's going to differ for each brand, which are the most important to use a CPG brand and, you know, a kitchenware brand, they're probably not going to use the same AMC audiences, but they're, it's just as useful to both 51.

So this really allows us to imply more intentional targeting and bid strategies instead of relying solely on, you know, broad in platform targeting 52. AMC also, you know, again, unlocks really deep measurement 52. We can evaluate new to brand behavior, analyze cross-haul opportunities and really better understand lifetime value dynamics, especially for one P brand 52. It becomes less about isolated campaign performance and more about understanding how the ecosystem works together 52. So using AMC, path to purchase report, you can literally see someone is on prime video and sees a streaming TV out of yours 52, 53.

Then they go to, you know, ESPN.com 53. They see an online video ad and like weather.com and they see a display ad and then Amazon, they click on a sponsored product 53. You can see that entire path and there's different attribution models that you can look at 53. So we typically will look at multi-touch attribution for that 53. But if you're not using AMC, most of your competitors likely are, or the top competitors in the space are, and you really need it in order to compete at the level that they are, because it's a report that, you know, should be used and is very important to analyze the incrementality of your spend 53, 54.

DSP, the typical metrics that you're going to see, they're kind of vanity metrics with the attribution model 54. You need to be looking at it and how it's moving users down the funnel because DSP doesn't net out straight row as 54. Yeah 54. And I mean, there's a lot of different use cases of AMC and we could do, we will definitely put out some more content, whether it's a webinar, educational series on it 54, 55.

I just want to make sure that we're getting through everything 55. So moving to six, implementing product targeting and conquesting 55. Harry, do you want to dive in here? 55 Yeah 55. So product targeting and conquesting, there are a lot of audits, I would say at least 20% that don't do much product targeting or aren't doing like any sponsored display 55. You know, not every shopper starts with a keyword 55. Many shoppers begin on a product detail page where they're comparing features, pricing and, you know, reviews 55. Product targeting allows us to intercept those shoppers at, you know, a critical evaluation stage 55, 56.

So we look for conquesting opportunities where competitors are structurally weaker 56. That might mean they're higher priced, they're lower ratings, they have poor imagery or like limited content 56. That's like the low hanging fruit 56. Those moments create, you know, an opportunity to present an alternative, a better alternative ideally 56. You might have more reviews or a lower price point 56. Another hack is that, you know, if your budgets are small and you're in really saturated categories where your competitors have like very deep pockets and there's just no way you feel like you can compete and let's say CPCs are like really high, product targeting is a great way to reach users in the consideration phase of the journey without having to pay those high CPCs 56, 57.

So, you know, competitors essentially would be paying to get those users onto their listings, those high CPCs for those, you know, broad non-branded terms 57. You target those listings at a lower cost and you're not paying those $10 to $15 CPCs and then you're reaching users who are actively browsing and considering buying a similar product 57.

So you're really intercepting them 58. So product targeting, it does not have as much of an impact on organic rank than keyword targeting, I will say that 58. However, it's still very important piece of any brand strategy 58. I think of product targeting more as a ROAS play than keyword just because it doesn't have as much of an impact on organic rank 58. But if you're not leveraging this, your competition has a leg up and it's certainly targeting you 58. But 10% of brands that I audit, they don't do any brand defense either with product targeting, which, you know, there's two types 58, 59.

You can target your competitors' product detail pages or you can target your own to defend your product detail page and push competitors off 59. Both are very important 59. If you're targeting your own, it's actually one thing that you should be looking for is how defending your own product detail pages is impacting your conversion rates from non-branded terms 59. I don't want to, just like the example I just talked through, you don't want to be paying all this money on really broad category terms to get people over to your page and then a competitor to steal them at the point that they're ready to make a purchase, right? 59, 60

So defending your brand is important too 60. We also use product targeting on the DSP to reengage shoppers who may have viewed your products and didn't purchase or may have viewed competitors' products and haven't purchased 60. These are really high-intent prospects who have already demonstrated interest 60. So these would be custom lists 60. But by reintroducing users who have expressed interest in the category to your product with strategic messaging or competitive positioning, we can capture share more efficiently than broad prospecting alone 60, 61.

Yeah 61. And also, you are spending money to get people to your product detail pages 61. So you don't want them to leak off with that going on to other competitors' pages who are targeting your product pages with product targeting ads 61. So it is important to defend that real estate 61. The CPCs for that real estate are also cheaper 61. And keep in mind that you're not getting charged unless they collect a summit impression-based cost model 61, 62.

So on the whole, you're also defending that real estate and making them stay on your page pages 62. And it doesn't really cost you that much to take over the spots 62. But Amazon's auction also gives the brand preference for its own product detail pages 62. Yeah 62. For sponsored products, it's pay per click 62. For sponsored display, there are goals 62. You can set to have it be cost per click and display ads 62. Do not get clicked on as frequently as sponsored product ads 62. So one hack that I also have is I'll do the CPC display ads where you're essentially getting almost free impressions if the clicks are really low, where you're getting more like brand exposure and you're not getting charged for those display ads unless someone clicks on them 62, 63.

Most sponsored display ads are VCPM 63. But if you set the goal as conversions, then it will be cost per click 63. All right, goal is CPC 63. Yep. So, moving on to number seven, ROAS isn't your North Star 63. So a lot of brands still anchor to we need to hit this ROAS at the campaign level or in the aggregate 63. And there's just so much data available that makes benchmarking to ROAS not only a poor benchmark, but the wrong one 63, 64.

Yeah 64. Do you want to dive into why that is? 64 Yeah. I mean, ROAS is a really useful metric 64. But it just doesn't tell us the full story 64. A high ROAS often comes from branded traffic and retargeting audiences who were already familiar with the brand 64. That can create the illusion of strong performance without necessarily expanding the customer base 64. That's the first thing is looking at blended ROAS 64. It's not a true view of incrementality 64. If teams optimize exclusively towards ROAS, budgets naturally gravitate towards lower funnel activity and overtime that can really limit acquisition and category expansion 64, 65.

ROAS keeps you focused on ad return and isolation 65. It tells you how efficient a campaign looks, but it does not tell you whether the business is actually growing 65. If you optimize only to ROAS, you naturally drift towards sometimes branded traffic, but sometimes traffic that isn't incremental, you get it anyways, or traffic that isn't high volume and isn't going to impact your organic rank 65. That can make performance look really strong on paper when you're just looking at ads in silo, but it's limiting acquisition and long-term expansion 65, 66.

What you need to do is you need to zoom out 66. Monitor tacos to understand how paid and organic work together 66. Tacos is ads being divided by sales 66. The percentage of your total sales that you're spending on ads, that's more of a scalable growth plan because essentially as you're selling more and your revenue is growing, you can spend more with ROAS 66. It doesn't take into account anything organically 66. Track your organic sales and your organic rank to see if advertising is strengthening your natural position 66, 67.

Look at share a voice and market share to understand competitive movement and then pay attention to conversion rates because it directly influences how efficiently you can scale 67. Sometimes, if brands I've noticed have a really low CPC strategy and they're not getting any top of search placements, their ROAS might be high just because their bids are set too low but their conversion rates are low 67. You should definitely be looking at ad conversion rates on a search term level 67.

You should be looking at what's happening organically 68. ROAS really can limit your ability to scale 68. How I think of it is would you rather have a $10 ROAS and a 10% tacos? 68 Would you rather have a $3 ROAS and a 7% tacos where you're more profitable? 68 You're looking at the bottom line there 68. All of these metrics, they influence each other 68. Advertising impacts organic rank 68. Organic rank impacts tacos 68. Conversion rate affects how impactful your ads are as well as impression share and scaling potential 68. If you only watch ROAS, you optimize a campaign 68.

If you watch the full ecosystem, you optimize the business 69. Brands that scale focus on broader growth indicators 69. Are we acquiring net new customers? 69 Are we increasing our share? 69 Are we expanding into high intent terms? 69 Efficiency matters but it should support growth rather than restrict it 69. I think what I've noticed is a lot of brands do not pull the trigger on DSP until it's too late and they've lost some share because DSP is not going to net out straight ROAS 69. That is why you need to be using AMC to look at the multi-touch attribution and different attribution layers 69, 70.

In terms of the question of moving away from ROAS with finance, you have the ability to calculate your P&L at an ASIN level 70. What you're seeing here is from iDrive and that top screen top 70. There's other softwares too for 1P and 3P or you can do this for not the only one 70. Then you have the ability to calculate your market share relative to your competitors in the market as a whole 70. There's no reason to, and sorry, then you have the ability to measure your organic sales versus your ad attributed sales and how that's trending over time relative to your ad spend 70, 71.

You can actually measure how your ad spend is impacting your bottom line, how it's influencing your growth, and how it's influencing your business relative to your competitors in the market in general, which is what any business should be looking at 71. ROAS is somewhat irrelevant and doesn't indicate whether the business is growing in a healthy way or not 71. I think that's, as Don Draper said, if you don't like what they're saying, change the conversation 71. That's what I would recommend if you're having trouble with finances that you need to change the conversation and reorient them 71, 72.

Yeah, that's Jason's favorite quote 72. The other thing that we roll into iDriven, some other companies I've heard do this, we have more advanced ROAS metrics, MOAS and LTV ROAS where essentially it's margin on ad spend and then LTV 72. It's taking into account your costs, but also the LTV for a certain period, you can do like 65, 180 days where you're able to see the expected future purchases that you'll get 72. If you're a subscription brand or you are a CPG brand where we know exactly when people typically repurchase and what the average repurchase rate is, you can sometimes accept a lower ROAS and lose sale on that first dollar if it's going to make up for it with sales down the road 72, 73.

All right, we're going to race through the last three here, segmenting campaigns by goals 73. All right, so next on lock is how campaigns are structured, not just how much we spend 73. So leading brands separate their Amazon programs into three distinct roles, acquisition, brand defense and retention 73. Each role really serves as a different purpose using different targeting and really should be measured differently 73, 74.

So acquisitions where we concentrate high intent category and competitor terms, it's really the entry points that consistently drive the first time purchasers 74. These live in dedicated acquisition campaigns, so budget is not competing with branded or retargeting activity 74. Branded retention are intentionally isolated and optimized for efficiency 74. Their job is really to capture existing demand at the lowest possible cost, not to absorb budget, that's really like meant for growth 74.

And then beyond role-based segmentation, high performing accounts also segment by match type 75. So like exact phrase and broad should not live in the same campaign 75. When match types are blended, you lose control over bidding and intent alignment 75. And we also push structure down to at least the product type or variation level 75. We avoid blending large product groups together 75. When campaigns are structured this way, each unit has a clear role 75. So the better campaigns are segmented, the more time it saves on optimizing over the long term as well 75, 76.

You gain visibility into what is truly driving performance 76. You avoid misleading blended row ads and you prevent overlap where multiple match types are targeting or competing against each other 76. DSP then extends reach and high propensity in your customer signals, which reinforces exposure before and after search 76. When everything has a defined role in a clear structure, optimization becomes a lot simpler 76. You also get a lot more visibility into where you're spending and measurement becomes more accurate 76, 77.

And you create a scalable growth framework that funds expansion through efficiency rather than incremental budget 77. There's so many accounts that I've audited where the brands think that they're spending like eight to 10% on branded because that's what they're targeting 77. But through broad match and phrase match, if they don't have the right negatives in place, I've seen brands spend up to 50% branded without even realizing it because they had the strategy that wasn't segmented 77. Hey, so in the interest of time, we're just going to move to nine and cover nine and 10 before taking a couple questions 77, 78.

So improving conversion rate 78. I talked about this obviously at the outset that ads is the lever to drive the traffic, that your PDP needs to be retail ready 78. Obviously, this is self-evident to a degree, but I would say that you also need to not treat it as one and done 78. And you need to continually optimize, especially for your top selling listings 78. Often that means rebuilding the foundation every so often and then making tweaks based on what's happening in search in terms of demands or in the category 78.

Or based on reviews and feedback that you're getting from your product, getting from consumers who are buying your product 79. So you want to really make sure it's not set it and forget it 79. So on one end, brands need to work on optimizing things 79. And then on the other end, they need to make sure you're not just checking it off and never coming back to it 79. Anything else that you would add here, Harria? 79 Thank you 79. All right 79. Last but not least, building a year round strategy 79. Harria, do you want to cover that quickly? 79

Yeah 80. I think many brands concentrate on planning around temple events like Prime Day or Black Friday or T12 80. These moments are important, but they don't create sustainable year round growth on their own 80. Also, when you're spending a lot of budget and you have deep discounts, your margins are really getting crushed 80. Not saying that's not the right strategy for some brands 80. It's just not a one size fits all 80. Consistent growth requires an always on acquisition strategy 80. This means maintaining prospecting layers, supporting category expansion and really utilizing DSP not just for retargeting, but when your budgets allow for it for upper funnel awareness and some consideration 80, 81.

When demand is consistently really being creative and captured, temple events become accelerators rather than rescue strategies 81. Growth becomes more stable, forecasting becomes more predictable, and the business is really less vulnerable to seasonal fatality 81. Great 81. Here's a summary of what we've already covered, the 10 categories 81. Our website is www.thinknector.com 81.

So, quickly, we have a couple of questions here 82. Mohamed, your question is about how to increase sales 82. I think your question is a little tough 82. I understand that your sales are slightly down 82. I think one general suggestion I have is to focus your spend on the products that can grow 82. Most companies don't have enough budget to spend as much as they would want to on every single product 82. So, I would say focus your spend on what can grow because you're competitive on price or you have good reviews, etc 82. As opposed to trying to make things work that don't 82.

Also, it depends whether you're on vendor central or seller central and what's the dynamics of what's happening with your business 83. Some vendors, they need to move out inventory so they can get more orders 83. Sometimes, they have to make some tough choices about promoing or getting more traffic and promote deals on certain ASINs to move them out so they can get more orders 83. So I would say that it's hard to answer your question precisely without knowing a lot more about your business 83. But feel free to reach out to us 83.

I would say, I would say really quickly is you have to focus on your hero's skills 84. When you have limited budget and you have a lot of skills, if you're spreading that budget really thin, it's not going to move the needle organically 84. So focus on the 20% that's going to drive the 80% of growth 84. And then I'd utilize search-grade performance to see where you might have really high, high purchase share 84. And you're spending a lot 84. If you want to lean off of those terms and for one week and see if your purchase share stays the same, then you can unlock opportunities where you have low purchase share, high conversion rates and low impression share 84, 85.

So last question that we'll take is, can you talk more about the AMC AISQL feature? 85 Harry, do you want to come to that one? 85 Yeah, absolutely 85. So when we talk about the AMC AISQL feature, we're really talking about the ability to run fully customizable queries inside of AMC to answer questions that really Amazon Standard Dashboards really aren't going to get to on their own 85. I think you're talking about the prompt where it's essentially creating a custom query for you 85, 86.

So at the basic level, SQL is just the language used to ask questions of the data 86. What makes this powerful in AMC is that we can define exactly how we want to look at customer journeys across every single ad type, all in a privacy safe environment 86. But this lets us move beyond surface level reporting and you can really ask it anything you want 86. You can say, "I would like to target." 86 You can build audiences off of it 86. I'd like to see an audience of customers who are browsing the category that are in the category that are in the category 86, 87.

So you can ask Amazon to do it for you with their AI feature 87. So there's a lot here 87. This webinar will be posted to our pages 87. I would say that if you're struggling with any of these things, you're not sure how you're performing or whether your brand and spend is incremental or whether your campaign setup is correct and you want a second set of eyes, don't hesitate to reach out to us 87. We're happy to walk you through it and how to do that 87. You can contact us through our website or on LinkedIn 87.

And I hope that you found this valuable today 88. We're big on trying to provide actionable content that you can take back and use to improve your business 88. Thank you all for the questions today and we hope to see you next time 88.

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