This Issue's TLDR...

• A Pareto approach to your Amazon product advertising
• 9 principles that will make your ads and creative assets better
• Don't click links in emails

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This week's Best@Amazon newsletter is a guest post from my good friend Neha Bhuchar.

If you don't know Neha, she's the founder of atom11, and Amazon PPC automation tool and this year's winner of the Amazon Beyond the Funnel Innovation Award.

After working with Amazon Ads for 6+ years, she realised that Amazon Ads cannot be run in siloes from retail/Seller Central data. With atom11, they bring together retail data with Amazon ads and to help you run more efficient, high ROI, ads. You can reach out to her at neha@atom11.co.

Now, on to her guest post!

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Product Advertised: The Most Under-Utilized optimization Technique for Amazon Ads

Let's assume you own an apparel shop. A customer comes into your store and asks for suggestions to buy a "blue shirt."

Which shirt will you show them first:

(a) top seller shirt: As chances of selling those out is highest,

(b) low selling shirt: As you’d like to move those shirts faster,

(c ) a medium selling shirt: As you have a lot of stock for that one.

Most likely you will show them (a). As a store owner, you'd like to have as many conversions/buys as possible.

But when it comes to PPC, advertisers often forget that. They continue to advertise their bottom sellers, because "the top sellers are already selling themselves, I want to push the low selling ones."

I will give you another example: Long time ago, I was an Instagram influencer (story for another day). Like any influencer, I used to be obsessed with number of Likes per post and number of new followers per post. To increase these numbers, I used to boost my post using Instagram ads.

Interestingly, when I boosted posts that were doing well organically, I used to get a boost in followers and likes. Within a few $ spent, I would get hundreds of likes and 30-40 followers. But when I boosted posts that were not doing well organically, I would just waste money. I would get a few likes and worst of all, no followers.

I realized that not all posts are created equal and I need to focus on the hit ones to grow my channel.

We apply the same logic to our PPC ads: Focus on your hero products. They will give you the highest sales, highest ROI and highest conversions.

There are hundreds of articles on bid management, but unfortunately, this simple but most effective optimization strategy remains hidden from most advertisers. Hence, they keep trying to improve ACOS and sales using bid management techniques, which are highly dependent on the market forces (i.e. competitor bids and # people bidding on similar keywords).

Now let's back this up with some data, shall we?

How This Logic Works In Amazon PPC:​
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Let me explain the graphs first.

We divide ASINs into 3 bands:

• Top selling ASINs (ASINs that lead to top 50% sales);
• Medium selling ASINs (ASINs that lead to next 30% sales); and
• Bottom selling ASINs (ASINs that fall in bottom 20% sales).

Blue bar shows the PPC spend % on these ASIN bands and the yellow bar shows the PPC ACOS of these ASIN bands.

These graphs are the first thing that advertisers see when they log into atom11, that is how important it is to know your spend % by ASIN bands.

We did an experiment with varying ad spend on different product bands to evaluate impact on ACOS and total sales. In Case 1, they had equal spend across the 3 brands. This resulted in an overall ACOS of 16.2%. In Case 2, they increased spend on Top seller ASINs by 13% (46% spent in Case 2 vs. 33% spent in Case 1). This improved their overall ACOS to 14.2%.

How You Can Measure Ad Spend % For Different ASIN Bands:

It's hard to combine retail/business reports data from seller central with advertising data at ASIN level. So, we built a tool for you and guess what...

It is free.

Simply add your business report data and your advertising bulk sheet and evaluate % ad spend by ASIN bands.

Summary:

Remember the following pointers:

• Find your hero ASINs - these are your top selling ASINs
• Spend more on hero ASINs - ideally more than 50% spend on top selling ASINs
• DO not set it and forget it. Seasonality, inventory and deliverability causes top ASINs to change
• Use this tool to evaluate your current ad spend vs. ASIN bands.

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BEST from my Inbox

One of the few non-Amazon newsletters that I consume is written by The Ad Professor.

It's a mix of eye candy and bite-sized behavioral marketing insights.

Like this:

All of The Ad Professor's weekly newsletters are great, but there was one issue from years ago that has stuck with me.

It is so good, that I have it saved to my desktop and come back to it 1-2x per month.

And, because summarizing it feels like a disservice, I've copied it verbatim below.

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How To Make Great Ads

It took me 10 years to develop these – and hopefully can save you from making a lot of mistakes:

1) The Facial Expression Test Every advert should create emotion.

If you want to know if your advert creates emotion, steal the Professor's "Facial Expression" test I give every client I work with.

Step 1 - Show people your ad.

Step 2 - Watch their facial expressions.

The more the facial expressions move, the greater the emotion you have created.

2) Obsess Over The Hook

The biggest mistake people in advertising make:

Assume the customer has lots of time. Do the opposite.

Assume the person is incredibly busy.

For video ads, the only thing you're guaranteed they will see: The first second.

For image ads, the only thing you're guaranteed they will see: The headline.

If this is viewed by 100% of your customers, obsess over it.

"On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents of your dollar." - David Ogilvy

Ogilvy's Rule: Spend 80% of your time on the most important thing – the hook.

3) Collect Ads Like Rich People Collect Watches

The worst thing you can do when coming up with an idea for a new ad: Stare at an empty page.

Instead, you want to collect ads like rich people collect watches.

Whenever it's time to come up with a new ad, scroll through your ad collection library for inspiration.

I've collected thousands of adverts.

Whenever I need ad creative inspiration:

I can pull up a Porsche Ad from 1972 or a TikTok Ad by Huel from last Christmas.

Here are some hacks:

1. Have an area for people in your company to share ads (e.g. Slack Channel)
2. Visit the Facebook Ad Library or TikTok ad library. (On the TikTok Ad library – you can now see the data of how each ad performed)
3. Use a tool like Foreplay to save ad inspiration from ad libraries.

4) Adapt To Your Environment

Do you remember this Dolly Parton meme that went viral?

This is one of the most powerful lessons for advertising.

Let me explain…

caption for image ​ Why?

Make sure every advert you make is designed for the channel it’s sitting on.

If you put your billboard ad on TikTok or Instagram Reels, it won’t work. You need to re-purpose it for the channel.

True story: The Professor spoke to one of the biggest advertisers in the world.

They were spending millions of dollars on vertical video ads – that weren't shot for vertical video.

5) Speak To Customers Before Launching Your Ads

If you are your customer – e.g., You're selling fitness products and you're a fitness fanatic, you can listen to your gut. If you are not your customer – make sure you speak to your customers before designing your marketing.

True story: I helped 5x the marketing of one Y Combinator company by doing this.

They were selling a home improvement product – but their marketing looked like a SAAS product.

Instead, we switched up their marketing for their customers (everyday people) rather than being designed for them (nerdy tech founders)

6) Do Not Make Your Ads Look Like Ads

Golden rule: The best marketing does not look like marketing.

The average person sees an estimated 6,000 ads per day.

If they see an ad coming, their defense mechanisms rise.

You want to create ads that don’t look like ads.

2 insights:

James Dyson (Billionaire founder of Dyson) used to take ads out in newspapers.

He then realized that when he had an editorial in the newspaper written about his products that didn’t look like an ad - it performed 1000x better.

Why?

Because it didn't look like an ad.

A huge trend in the advertising industry is influencer whitelisting. What is this?

It's when the influencer posts to their organic feed – and it is then ran as a paid ad.

Why does this work?

Because of the golden rule: It doesn't look like an ad.

7) Marketing Is A Multiplier Of Product

If you have a 0/10 product and multiply it with 10/10 marketing – you're left with 0.

If you do not have product-market fit, do not spend any money on advertising.

1. Obsess over the product until it's great – and then shift your focus to marketing.
2. Make sure your product has the unit of economics to spend money on advertising.

In the last 10 years, I've seen the back-end advertising strategy of some of the world’s fastest-growing companies.

Do you want to know a crazy secret?

You could copy their marketing strategy and apply it for other businesses – and it wouldn't work.

The reason why it works is because their amazing marketing multiplies their amazing product and unit of economics.

8) Always Invest In Creative

This is a rule of thumb that is as old as advertising itself.

Do not cut corners when it comes to creative.

It's the biggest asset you can invest in.

When Rolls-Royce got David Ogilvy to produce their iconic ad campaign, they could've saved 20-30% by going to a cheaper alternative – but Ogilvy's ad produced 10-100x that cheaper alternative could ever do.

This isn't just relevant in Ogilvy's time – it's relevant today.

True story: The CRAFTD CEO (Danny Buck) said this one advert creative style made £20 million in sales.

The upside of one winning creative style is humongous.

Facebook recently announced that ad creative determined 54% of an advertiser’s result. Invest accordingly.

9) Question Everything

One of the biggest problems in advertising:

"I know 50% of my budget is working… I just don't know which 50%"

In order to know what is and isn't working – you need to be tracking as much as you can.

1. Invest in attribution
2. Monitor results daily
3. If you’re running physical ad campaigns that can’t be tracked, run A/B tests.

Fun story: eBay was spending $20 million on Google ads for their own keyword: "eBay" According to their attribution, it was bringing in $245.6 million!

They ran an experiment where they stopped running the search for an entire month. Guess what happened? Nothing.

BEST from X

Scammers are getting better.

Be careful out there.

👉 REMEMBER: Don't click links in emails (except for this one 😉)

Amazon Sellers ASGTG @AmazonASGTG This is spam that looks legit @amazon Sellers. 2:53 PM • Jan 20, 2025 0 Retweets 0 Likes Read 1 replies

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Remember my message from last week's BEST From The World of ETA?

👉 Always ask why the seller is selling.

One reason that I counsel that is to de-risk your acquisition.

The other reason?

To build a personal connection with the seller.

Deals are as much about relationships as they are about numbers.

Having that personal relationship with the seller can be the difference between winning and losing a deal when there are multiple offers.

Eric Hsu @lawyer4SMBs “We’ve decided to accept a more competitive offer.” If you’re a business buyer, these words might sting. And you’re hearing them more often these days. Why? Search Fund ETA is surging in popularity. Influencers like @Codie_Sanchez and @SMB_Attorney are putting it in… https://x.com/i/web/status/1879535456255365383 8:25 AM • Jan 15, 2025 1 Retweets 3 Likes Read 1 replies

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