#31 Amazon Ads Specialist Danny McMillan Interview – PART ONE

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:42 — 40.0MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Email | RSS

This Episode, #31, was prompted by our very own Facebook members! They said in a survey that Amazon Ads were the area they most wanted expert help with. Danny McMillan responded by giving many golden nuggets to our listeners.

This is the first of two episodes containing this interview.

SHOW NOTES FOR EPISODE #31

WHERE TO CATCH DANNY

Doing a presentation in Hong Kong after the Canton Fair. 

Www.dannymcmillan.com

To connect with Danny, click on these links:

 Linkedin;

Twitter: @dannymac1000 

Facebook: Facebook

Danny’s background 

Had been looking at eBay. 

Realised Amazon FBA had everything he wanted in a business. 

Radio show on Kiss FM for 2 years at the turn of the noughties. 

Ran own record labels late ’90s/early 2000s. Creating an Amazon business has many similarities including working in a team.

In 2008, left music biz. Become MD of a tech startup for 2 years. Shut down in 2010 after £500K in investment. 

2012 head of digital at a ticketing company which had an exit. He used PPC to increase business and gain investor confidence. 

Danny’s specialist skills that he brings to  Amazon:

On page optimisation and SEO for ASIN

PPC/Amazon ads

Import/Export processes 

Why Amazon? 

You can bootstrap but it is easily scalable. 

In most start up companies; it’s about how fast you can resolve the customer’s problem before you run out of investor cash. This is a lot easier to do with just one web page (such as an Amazon product listing) and building out scale from there

There are various specialist roles in an amazon business. Danny was attracted to the marketing and SEO/Adwords side. 

Why are Amazon ads important?

Instant visibility esp when you have no sales history, no conversion history. 

It also helps ranking on Amazon for organic sales as a conversion history is built. 

Common issues

A lot of people do something like:

1. Run an auto campaign 
2. Give up on that
3. Run manual campaign 
4. Tweak something every day in an unstructured way. 
5. Then they are basically lost! 

You need a clear strategy. 

LINKS TO DANNY’S SPREADSHEETS: click here

SEE DANNY’S DETAILED NOTES HERE

DANNY’s RECOMMENDED SIMPLEST ACTION SUMMARY:

Week 1. 

Create first auto campaign. 

End week 1: Cut and paste keywords into Amazon and check for relevance ;add negative exact keywords to the campaign that don’t fit your product criteria. 

If needed, tweak product page (title and back end keywords) but be mindful that wholesale changes can / will affect rankings

Week 2: 

add second auto campaign with higher bids

Week 3: 

create a bridge to manual campaign. 

Weeks 4+:

Use 3rd party tools to gradually add keywords:

DETAILS ON SETTING UP AMAZON ADS

WEEK ONE

Set up your first auto campaign. Aim: tuning or validating your listing and showing your listing to Amazon. 

Guidelines: £10 a day budget, 40 p per click bid. This varies by product category so only a starting point. You need / can define this yourself, be an experimenter….

If you get no impressions after two days, up the bid per click. 

After one week, run a keyword report. If you find irrelevant words, add them to your auto campaign as “negative exact match” keywords, which means they won’t bring up your advert. 

The aim of starting out with PPC is a “clean out” process. Basically you are finding the converting words and getting rid of irrelevant ones that waste clicks and money. It is NOT to get sales at first, although that is a good side effect!  The goal here is to play it long and reap the benefits.

WEEK TWO

if you are getting a lot of unrelated keywords showing up in the auto campaign, tune your listing. 

Tweak the title if needed. 

Careful with changing this later too much as it affects organic ranking. But at the beginning you haven’t much to lose. 

Also the back end Search Term Field (keywords; which are in the final tab in the product editing part of seller central). You usually have 5 fields for this, each 50 characters so total 250 characters. In some categories Amazon has rolled out 1000 chars to play with in the top line, we are still testing the effects of lines 2,3,4,5.

WEEK TWO

We are still just using auto campaigns. 

Danny has European auto campaigns in France, Spain and Italy and the ACoS is below 15% so it can work really well. But… Patience is the key here as you have to rough it out sometimes to get it under control.

Create a Second auto campaign for same product but with higher bids (far enough away to avoid the algorithm getting confused) . 

This may have some impact on first auto campaign. 

Bring  over exact match negative keywords from the first auto campaign. 

Aim: guide amazon’s algorithm to “get” your listing. 

Run your auto campaigns for about a month. 

Patience is important. 

More details in Part Two – next Episode!

LINKS TO DANNY’S SPREADSHEETS: click here

SEE DANNY’S DETAILED NOTES HERE

WHERE TO CATCH DANNY

Doing a presentation in Hong Kong after the Canton Fair. 

Www.dannymcmillan.com

To connect with Danny, click on these links:

 Linkedin;

Twitter: @dannymac1000 

Facebook: Facebook

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE TO THIS PODCAST

A podcast is a free downloadable audio show that enables you to learn while you’re on the go.  To subscribe to my podcast for free, you’ll need an app to listen to the show from.

For iPhone/iPad/iPod listeners – Grab your phone or device and go to the iTunes store and search “Amazing FBA”.

This will help you to download the free Podcasts App (produced by Apple) and then subscribe to the show from within that app.  Every time I produce a new episode, you’ll get it downloaded right on your iDevice.

For Android listeners – Download the Stitcher Radio app (free) and search for “Amazing FBA Podcast.”  Or, if you have already downloaded a podcasting client, follow the directions in the next sentence.

For podcast enthusiasts – If you already listen to podcasts and have a podcatcher that you prefer, the feed you’ll need to add is: http:// amazingfba.com/feed/podcast.

For those who don’t have a mobile device – You can always listen to the show by clicking the audio file at the top of this page.

If you have any queries, just go to www.amazingfba.com/ask.

Watch Amazon Ads Auto Campaign – with Danny McMillan (Part 1 of 2)

[video_page_section type=”youtube” position=”bottom” image=”” btn=”light” heading=”” subheading=”” cta=”” video_width=”1080″ hide_related=”false” hide_logo=”false” hide_controls=”false” hide_title=”false” hide_fullscreen=”false”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyxyyRHJUC0&feature=youtu.be[/video_page_section]