Planet Amazon Podcast

From Military Service to Amazon Success: Andy Craig’s Expertise in PPC and Product Launches

• Adam Shaffer • Episode 18

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In this episode we are joined by Andy Craig, an Army veteran who's conquered the Amazon marketplace with his agency, Adhabit. Andy delves into his agency's tailor-made strategies that help clients shine in a crowded marketplace. Discover the art of optimizing conversion rates, the intricacies of A/B testing, and the shrewd game of bidding on competitor brand names. Andy generously lays out his playbook, from enhancing listings with compelling visuals to harnessing Amazon's own tools to soar in sales rankings.

The episode is packed with inspiration and practical advice for launching and sustaining successful products on Amazon. Andy shares insights into the importance of brand protection, the impact of reviews and videos, and the crucial role of tracking metrics. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or an established online retailer, Andy's story and expertise offer a treasure trove of guidance for navigating Amazon's competitive waters.

For more information about Andy and Adhabit, you can visit the following links:

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The Planet Amazon podcast, brought to you by Phelps United, addresses all things Amazon and other eCommerce marketplaces. In each episode, we talk with Brands, Agencies, and Sellers about Amazon news, new features, policies, brand policies, logistics, marketing, issues, and challenges, among other topics.

To watch all Planet Amazon Podcast episodes, visit our YouTube channel.
To learn more about Phelps United, visit our website.

Announcement:

Welcome to the Planet Amazon podcast with Adam Shaffer, where we explore the world of Amazon and other e-commerce marketplaces. Join us as we delve into the latest strategies and tactics for successful selling on the world's largest online marketplace.

Adam Shaffer:

Hello, I'm Adam Shaffer and welcome to Planet Amazon, where we talk about all things Amazon, and today I wanted to welcome to the podcast Andy Craig. Who is Andy Craig, you might ask? Well, it's an interesting story and he's going to tell us more, but Andy is an Army veteran turned Amazon entrepreneur, from Detroit, no less. After diving into Amazon in 2020, he quickly transitioned from launching products. Diving into Amazon in 2020, he quickly transitioned from launching products to founding his own ad agency called AdHabit in 2021. Andy is a super passionate person in general, but he's also passionate about leveraging Amazon's platform to help brands grow, and he loves sharing his life lessons to people on Amazon and in the real world outside of Amazon. He's just that kind of guy. He's also a husband and a father of two, and that I definitely want to also understand a bit more, because I have two kids running around the house today and he's enjoying every moment of his journey. So welcome to the show, andy. Thanks for having me, really great intro.

Adam Shaffer:

So tell me first, before we get into all this other work stuff. Tell me about the kids.

Andy Craig:

Well, I got a four-year-old and a soon-to-be nine-year-old. They're both at school right now, thankfully, so there's no background noise here today. Yeah, they're both great. We're here in Michigan and you know they're one boy, one girl.

Adam Shaffer:

Okay, I have two girls and so there's basically three women in our family and I'm the only guy. So I get outranked every minute of every day. So I live a painful life with my family, but I love them to death. So cool and good luck with your family. Now, this Army thing to Amazon. I mean, I imagine there's people out there that have been in the Army and then went to Amazon. But you were in the Army for a while. What happened? What made you take the leap from serving our country to now serving folks on Amazon?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, there was a little bit of gap, I would say, in between. I was artillery in the Army for six years and then I became an electrician my last couple of years and then I transitioned to become an electrician with General Motors, fixing the machines and the plant that helped to build all the cars and the factory. Life just wasn't for me as much. So I was always looking for something entrepreneurial to leave and, just like many others, I seen Amazon. I seen the opportunity with Amazon FBA, so I just dove in, learned as much as I could, started launching products and I really got a knack for the Amazon ads, the PPC side of things, which kind of led me to where we are today. Right, I started doing it for my own products, helping friends, and then I got more demand from other brands than I could handle myself, and that's where AdHabit was born. So I started hiring, training and that's kind of how I grew up from there.

Adam Shaffer:

So the products you were launching, were they your products, private label, or were they third-party products?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, when I started out I looked into all the aspects. Right, there's the wholesale, there's the retail arbitrage and I just seen a much bigger opportunity in the private label side because you have a lot more control there as well and I believe usually there's higher margins With wholesale. You need more quantity right Over quality and you don't really have as much control. And I feel brands could you have an agreement in place with brands with wholesale, but they could always decide to just sell themselves on Amazon and I didn't want to have that additional risk of the business.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, no, I get it. I mean, our company is helping brands and there's always that fear that you build them up to this point where they say, okay, maybe we want to do it ourselves or whatever. So there's always that risk that you lose a great client. So you always got to get more. But so what's interesting about it is you said you got kind of into the PPC. What's funny is I meet a lot of people that get into Amazon and the PPC and the advertising and setting ads is complicated and scary and obviously that's why agencies like yours are around. But it seems like that's where you gravitate it. Personally, I love it, but it's definitely like the ocean it never stops. There's always something you got to be doing. So why don't you talk a little bit about how you work with clients and how you build a great PPC campaign? I know it's kind of a loaded question, but give us your best shot at that one.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, I mean how we work with clients. Clients come to us when you know, either they don't want to do the PPC themselves they have had bad experiences trying to learn it or hire, and then they come to us because we have the expertise that we've been doing it for years. We take a very hands-on approach with the advertising and part of my background, too, is I went to school for engineering, right, so I'm a numbers guy. We really look at the numbers and come up with a plan to tell us exactly what to do Now with PPC campaigns. We don't know if it's going to be successful or not. We're all about testing, right. We test something.

Andy Craig:

If it works, we do more of it. If it doesn't work, we pull back and try a different strategy. And you know, these campaigns could run for years and years and years and just as the longer you run them, the more consistency you're usually going to see. And it's not, like you know, with Facebook. A lot of times you just stop a campaign, start a new one. Amazon has a lot more history built into their campaigns.

Adam Shaffer:

So I guess there's a budget or something like that. But when you start to attack it, are you focused on manually doing this or are you using software? How do you do it? Because I find that we've tried software and then our guys will wind up setting it and forgetting it, and then we have to come running back and adjust things later. What's your philosophy here?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, so we don't like the softwares that are the set it and forget it, because there's a lot of them out there that have their special algorithms, but what we found, because we've tested some of these, is they don't work for every product, they don't work for every client. So we use a good mixture of a software that we have a lot of control over and expert PPC strategists is what we call them, ppc managers that have been doing this for years that can utilize the software to help them with the campaigns.

Andy Craig:

So you're doing a lot of manual labor, along with some software helping you exactly because, as you've seen, with amazon right, we there's a lot of different reports, there's a lot of different things you can look at, and we started off and we still use, you know, the bulk operations which are to pull all the ads into spreadsheets, um, which is a great way to do it right instead of just clicking in campaign manager all over the place. But with the software, it saves a lot of time. We're able to stop downloading a bunch of reports, open it up in Excel and now we're able to get all the data through Amazon's API, and it saves us a ton of time and gives us a really nice quality dashboard to look at all the campaign performance, the keyword performance, all the data that we need in an instant.

Adam Shaffer:

And do you look at long tail? Are you focused on just a small amount of words? Because there's some people who say, oh, we should just focus on the top 10 words and that's it. And then there's some that say, wow, you really got to play that long tail. That's kind of why you need to get some kind of software to help manage or organize it. But how do you go about it?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, we do both right and it really depends on the client where they're at in their journey with the product. If they're just launching, we may focus more on the long tail, highly specific, and then sprinkle in some of the higher competitive words. But it's so dependent on everything. We focus on everything right. We long tail, short tail categories. There's a lot of different ad types on Amazon that you know, give you a different kind of brand awareness and things like that that we could push out there.

Adam Shaffer:

And how do you deal with? You know you mentioned competitive words. How do you deal with competitors? Like you know, you have a brand that you're helping manage and things are going okay and you're getting you know the cost to acquire down and things are getting going the right direction. All of a sudden, you kind of bottom out and you see competitors coming all over you. What's your thoughts on that?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, we can't control, you know competition, right? What we have to do is control how we perform versus the competition. So there's a lot of different benchmarks you could look at to see how your competitors are doing versus you, and the conversion rate is going to be that most important thing, right, Because Amazon ads it's an auction, so if your competitors are converting better than you, they could afford to be higher on that auction because that cost per click is going to be built into it, right? So if you're converting at 10% and they're converting at 20, they could afford double the cost per click or the bid that you can afford. So we always want to look at those benchmarks and if we're not converting quite as well, we need to go into the listing and figure out what we need to change, whether it's the image, the main images, the A plus content, the title, the reviews, you know the price point, maybe and really come up with that strategy as well.

Adam Shaffer:

Andy, I'm glad you brought that up, so it's not just let me figure out what I'm going to bid on. You actually are looking at the listings themselves, right? So you're sitting there trying to optimize listings. Are you working on words and photos, videos Like? How do you go about that?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, so a lot of this stuff. It really goes hand in hand right Like we're a PPC agency primarily, but the listing kind of goes hand in hand with it. So we go through and we work with them. We have a full creative team in-house to optimize those listings. And Amazon even has split testing built right in to where we could split test the images and we could split test the things to see what's going to push the needle to that next point of that click-through rate and the conversion rate to compete in any niche.

Andy Craig:

So you've been doing A-B testing. Yeah, so we're doing A-B testing. We build out videos for the clients. Now we can't A-B test a video, but what we'll do with that is we'll actually run this video for a week. We'll run this video for a week or whatever period of time we want to do with the test to see which one performs better. Thing you could do with A-B test is usually going to be the title and the reviews I'm sorry, not the reviews. The title and the main image on Amazon is going to have a huge impact. And then the price point. There are softwares out there that could help you to split test that as well. It's a little bit more manual if you want to do it yourself on Amazon.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, I mean, and it's interesting. Like you know, I go to the Accelerate show. I don't know if you've been to that in Seattle, but it's great and you could see the amount of money that Amazon's investing in the tools. And obviously this A-B testing and the ability to run tests and then let the winning result continue on is to me great. And obviously they have all the brainpower in the world there. They have, you know, data scientists and all these guys looking at all this stuff all the time.

Adam Shaffer:

So I think that if people aren't leveraging that there, you know they should. If they're not, because even just a little bit better result, like I don't think you could go wrong with A-B testing, because either you're going to keep the results you have or you're going to better it. And if you can keep on trying to better it, why not? And you know Amazon wants higher conversion rates because they want more sales, like so it kind of works and so I'm thrilled that you're doing that for your clients. When it comes to the content itself, are you trying to change like the bullets and the copy to try and get a higher conversion on that?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, yeah, that's one of the things that when we first onboard a client, we kind of do a complete listing audit as well to see if they're ranking on the right keywords, if they're even indexing, which means like, can you even show up on the keywords according to Amazon's algorithm? So we'll double check all that and if we need to rebuild the copy, that's what we'll do. Right, and we the title is going to be a huge impact. And then the back backend search terms, like if we're going after hard, if we're trying to rank on a certain keyword we need to put that and run some tests with the title and okay, good, fair enough.

Adam Shaffer:

And then when it comes to the competitors again I bring that up because I'm in a world where there's always lots of competitors Are you buying their names? It's funny. I was talking to someone the other day about Epson, who makes label printers or receipt printers, and in the real world, outside Amazon, they're the number one player. Like you, go into every store, you see it, but on Amazon you punch in Epson and you'll see 10 other guys there, the brands that you've never heard of. They're definitely all offshore kind of manufacturers coming in, and then Epson is somewhere down at the bottom. So these guys are all buying the word Epson. Are you buying competitive names? Is that work? Because I can see it working for them. I just don't know if it works for Epson.

Andy Craig:

I can see it working for them. I just don't know if it works for Epson. So a lot of times, right, we're not going to be able to convert as well as Epson when people are looking for an Epson. But right now we're running a strategy with one of our clients because they've kind of hit the ceiling to where they can rank on the category type keywords. So we're starting to go after some of the competitors. We're seeing an increase in rank as we kind of get more aggressive with those and get some of the share away from it.

Andy Craig:

But you have to spend a bit more, right? Yeah, usually. And it depends if that brand is even protecting their brand search terms, because if they're not, usually the bid is not going to need to be very high for it. And then also there's tools like Amazon brand analytics, to where we could track our market share on certain keywords. So, as we're pushing these and as Amazon brand analytics to where we could track our market share on certain keywords, so as we're pushing these and as we're spending more, we could actually measure to see if we're getting more market share on those keywords.

Adam Shaffer:

Cool. So and then when it comes to advertising, obviously you know you're buying keywords, but are you doing any brand advertising? So do you try to promote the entire brand or is that like super expensive and doesn't convert?

Andy Craig:

well, no, every everything has its bid right, because it's all going to be based on the conversion. If we're converting well, we can afford a higher bid, but if we're not, we'll just lower the bids. So we're like those sponsored brand ads right. We can show up headline search ads all the way at the top of search when people first land on the search results page. We can be right up at the top with a few products and a nice custom image and we like to tailor that custom image to what people are searching for. And then a little bit down, sometimes at the top, we get the video ad, which it depends on the video and it depends on how competitive that ad is going to be. But that could be a very, very well converting ad placement and I've had brands that just take off just with that one video. That just does very well.

Adam Shaffer:

So video ads are huge. I mean, I see them everywhere, my eye always goes to them and I almost always click, even if I'm not looking for that product, because it kind of tells the story right there. So so you're doing that too, so you're doing a lot of video ads for your clients.

Andy Craig:

Yep.

Adam Shaffer:

Yep, Okay, that's awesome. And and what? What's your thoughts and what's your philosophy on the brand store? Like, is that important, Not important? I see some people like spend a fortune of time on it and then some just you know it's not important enough, it doesn't matter.

Andy Craig:

I think it depends on how much you're running with the sponsored brand ads, because you could run ads that you know send people directly to your storefront. So if you're trying to test out a lot more of this, you need to have a well converting storefront. So that's where I kind of get into the importance of it. Right, are we pushing people towards it or are we not? I always recommend build everything out the best that we can and invest it. That way, everything's set. Now let's start to push ad spend towards well-converting Amazon. You know kind of pages.

Adam Shaffer:

So your brand ads will go to the brand store.

Andy Craig:

They can, so we could send them either to the product detail page or send them directly to the brand store.

Adam Shaffer:

Cool. So you've been doing this for a while. What's been like your biggest success? You don't have to tell us the brand, but you know, tell us something about where you got involved with the client and it was just a mess and you really really streamlined it and now it's off the charts.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, I mean we've done. We've worked with brands that have been up and running a while. We've worked with brands that are just getting started, and it's one of my favorite things is launching new products, right, because we can get in there, we could launch a new product, and when that hits and when that really starts to rank, that's one of my favorite things. You know, getting them from zero to their first $10,000 in sales, 20, 30, and just every month, seeing it kind of go up on a on a nice curve, is something I love, right, we we do a lot of training with brands too, because I love teaching people how to do it. So we'll get in there, we'll train them how to do it themselves, and I love the excitement when they see things are starting to turn around and hit the goals and numbers that they're starting to see.

Adam Shaffer:

So you're helping people launch new products.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, we're helping them launch new products, but we're also training them how to do their own PPC, because a lot of brands want to build their own in-house teams. So we show them. We transfer our expertise over to their teams to show them how to do it themselves.

Adam Shaffer:

I always found new products is like a lot of work, like so. But you guys, because it's from every discipline you have to be good at with a new product and getting it out there. So that's awesome, because in some cases, there's agencies that don't want to work with starters. They want to work with brands that are already spending a lot of money and need help. But I think that that's really admirable, that you're working with people that are trying to get new products launched, because it's actually the most fun. It's just it's a lot of work and it's awesome that you're doing that. So you've taken some brand new products from zero to something right.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, yeah, exactly, and it doesn't always happen right. With any new product, there's going to be a risk to it because it's not tested yet. But you have to launch it, you have to start pushing things and I like to work with the brands to develop that strategy, and we've had clients that have just taken off and hit with one product, be able to go from zero in the first month to the first 20,000, and then the next month to 40 and to 50, so on and so forth.

Adam Shaffer:

You said it a little earlier, but you were talking about something else but product reviews. When you do these new products, do you help them get the reviews too?

Andy Craig:

No, we don't have a review service. We do recommend a lot of different strategies whether it's Amazon, vine, using their own email list to develop, to get those first reviews. But that's a very important aspect, right, people need to kind of step back and look at their listings versus their competition. Right, if you're a higher price point, if you're a new product with no reviews, why would somebody click and pick yours versus the competition? So you need to have a strategy in place to get those initial reviews. And if I'm looking at a product and I see, hey, this one has 5,000 reviews, but they're only four stars, and this new one has five stars, but there's only 15, I might be considering buying this new one because it's obviously of a better quality.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, I mean Vine is great, but you got to have a good product, because if you don't they might give you a bad review and that could be trouble.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, and the people in the Vine program may not be your ideal customer avatar, so they might not even need this product. So the average Vine reviews, I believe, are like 4.2, 4.3 stars. Is that right? Oh, okay, that's what I've heard. I'm just kind of pulling it off the back of my head yeah, no, I didn't realize that.

Adam Shaffer:

I mean, I think there is a little. I think it's important, but I definitely always think there's a little bit of a risk. You know, you got to kind of do everything right now. If you don't have a great product, you probably shouldn't be trying to sell it, unless it's, you know, Uber, inexpensive and people get that. They're getting less for less. But, um, I think the quality of the product, the packaging and all that stuff is super important. Are you helping any of these new brands with their packaging at all? Is that part of it or not?

Andy Craig:

No, we don't do any of the packaging. We have partners that can help with that, but we don't do any of the packaging design in-house. But we will give them kind of recommendations on it, right, because that packaging.

Adam Shaffer:

You could put that main image on Amazon so it could have a huge impact on that conversion and click-through rate when people see your listing for the first time and let's go to BSR for a bit when you're looking at the products that you're managing, obviously you want to get that ranking as close to one as you can, which is not always easy. But is that like a KPI for you guys? Like where did we start with you and now where are we with your ranking?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, that's something. We're very data focused, right. So we're tracking all the metrics and the BSR is one of them. We like to track the BSR of the category, but also the subcategory, and make sure we're going in the right direction, either being consistent if we're happy with where we are, or we're on a constant trend down, which, for BSR, right, we want to go lower, right, we want to get to that number one spot. So that's a very important metric. And every time, one of the things I hate is running out of stock, right, but it does happen, right, we run out of stock, we see that BSR start to go back back up, right, and then we come back in stock and we have to kind of push even harder to work to get that BSR back to where it was.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, no. I mean, if you're not in stock it's deadly and it definitely happens, but you got to make sure that you're in stock. I mean, that's like the requirement on Amazon you can't sell it if you don't have it for sure, and so have you you've. You can't sell it if you don't have it for sure, and so have you been able to get some of your products that you manage into the top 15 or 20 or something like that?

Andy Craig:

Oh yeah, yeah Not every client, like if it's a new brand that's just starting. It's going to take a while, right, but we do our best to constantly track it and come up with a plan of action to get there.

Adam Shaffer:

So we're coming and I don't want to date this podcast too much, but we're coming and I don't want to date this podcast too much, but we're coming into prime day. So is there any secret advice that you want to tell people about? On what? What are good practices for prime day? Is it spending a lot more money on on ppc? Is it promotions? Is it coupons? What? What's your thoughts there?

Andy Craig:

yeah, we we're actually working with a lot of our clients right now on that strategy and it's going to be different with each one. We give them their options and ultimately let them make the decision. But some of our brands they want to just do business as normal. But other brands really want to hit Prime Day hard. They got the stock in place to do it. So we're going to start ramping up some of the ad spend leading up to the prime day and then when prime day hits, we're going to push even harder and the conversion rates on prime day go through the roof so we can afford those higher ad placements, those higher you know, that higher bid in place where some of our brands, like I said, they just want to use the extra traffic, even kind of turn down their bids a little bit, where they're just maximizing their profitability on the day.

Adam Shaffer:

I mean, Prime Days is huge. From what I understand, it's as good as Cyber Weekend. Is that what you find? I don't know. Prime Day 2 isn't as good, but it's still pretty good.

Andy Craig:

It's usually based on the niche, right. We see it kind of different all over the place, but every year we see it perform better and better right. More people know about Prime Day. The more Prime customers we have, the more sales we usually get. Every Prime Day is better than the last is almost what we see.

Adam Shaffer:

So you know whether it's Prime Day or not Prime Day or holiday or not holiday. You know one thing that a lot of the tools give you the ability to do is day parting, and I don't know what your thoughts on it. I mean, is it a scam or is it like? Is day parting something that you should try to do?

Andy Craig:

I think you should test it. That's our thing. Test it, see how it works. You don't have to do it with every campaign. You can do it with some. We do a little bit of it, but we don't do a lot of the Amazon marketing stream stuff. But we'll maybe shut off our ads on certain times of the day that we know we don't convert well, Like if it's midnight and 5am. We'll just save the ad spend for those better converting times. So that's about all we do for that.

Adam Shaffer:

So you see that there's times a day where people are maybe just shopping but they're not buying, like they might be looking and clicking but they're not doing the deal.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, and we also have days of the week where that day is a much better performer, so we will push harder. On a certain day, we know that we get a lot more sales and a lot higher conversion rates.

Adam Shaffer:

No, it's funny because we have some products now. Our weekends used to be quite low, but now we have some consumer products that are. It seems that the weekend is their best day, so it is pretty interesting. It's definitely based on the product. The more B2B it is, the less it's going to sell on the weekend.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, we have some office products that just do much better on a Wednesday than they do on a Saturday.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, no, but I used to hate the weekend. It was depressing. Now I kind of dig it. So that's interesting and you know, I know that you said you don't really do it, but off, amazon has become quite big. There's a couple of firms out there that are helping brands with Google advertising to Amazon, and you know what's your thoughts on that, because it's just another expense to me, but is it required?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, I think it's been a, you know, a big topic lately, like everyone's talking about sending Google ads to Amazon, sending external traffic in, which I think is great, but you're always you're let's just say, usually you're usually going to have a much better conversion rate through Amazon PPC. So if you're not maximizing your potential there, I don't think it's time to start testing out Google Ads yet. If you're not ranking on your keywords, at least on page one, let's not work on Google Ads yet because there's still an issue on Amazon.

Adam Shaffer:

Right. So get Amazon right before you start going off Amazon for sure, and that's good.

Andy Craig:

I was just going to say that's just with you know kind of ad spend, right, I still recommend people to build their, their presence off Amazon, their social media, build all that stuff, because building the brand and then pushing, like Google, ads to Amazon are two different things, because some of our best performing clients they've built a brand through Amazon, through through Facebook, through Shopify, through Instagram, through you know, tick tock all these different channels, and those are the brands that I see doing the best. Right, because people are coming to Amazon, not from Google, but they're coming to, they're looking for that brand themselves.

Adam Shaffer:

So they're building the brand off Amazon and people are going to find it on Amazon and buy it. Yeah, you know it's interesting. I love Shopify, but I just sometimes believe that the conversion rate is better on Amazon because people are just more comfortable buying it on Amazon. They have their accounts set up, they know that they're going to return it without a hassle, which nobody likes returns, but it's part of the game. So I definitely I see the benefits of it and I also believe Amazon gives you. If it's on the 14-day cookie, if it comes from Google to Amazon, they'll give you a percentage back like 8%.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, yeah, that brand performance bonus or whatever.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, no, I think it's a big deal because you know that's for three-piece sellers. They're spending probably between $8 and $15 or something for the commission. So that's a good way to incent you.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, and that's something we help our customers set up is those attribution links so they can send traffic from their email list, from influencers, from whatever social channels they're trying to track Are you again?

Adam Shaffer:

I know you spend most of the time in advertising, but are you helping people build their social media, or influencers or any of that?

Andy Craig:

No, we don't work with influencers. We do have recommendations and partners that we work with. That that's their primary focus, but we try to keep our attention focused on Amazon.

Adam Shaffer:

Do you think that influencers are helpful?

Andy Craig:

I do. I think you find the right influencer and I think that external traffic does help a lot with the Amazon algorithm and, honestly, everything, you're building the brand right. The more people see the product, the more they're going to know about you, the more they're going to hopefully purchase and the bigger you're going to kind of build your presence on Amazon, on Amazon, on online period.

Adam Shaffer:

I mean, do you ever mess around with Amazon posts at all?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, we have a lot of clients. We don't do it too much ourselves, but we have a lot of clients that they're already developing. You know the content, so why not post it there also and we're able to see it work right? And the thing is, it's still free. Amazon doesn't charge for it no, I mean so.

Adam Shaffer:

So why not?

Andy Craig:

it's the time to do it right yeah, and just extra, and if you can do it to where it's right, if you have a employee maybe they're a va, virtual assistant or something that doesn't cost you a ton you can measure their time spent on that versus the sales because amazon does provide that and see what kind of return on investment you have there.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, I mean it's funny that more people don't do it because it is free. It is a little mind boggling. But I think they think, oh no, it's not going to convert. But to me it's like the more content that's out there the better. Why not? But it is the time and it's another cycle out of your life. But, like you said, you can get vas to post for you for, you know, a small amount of money.

Andy Craig:

I don't think it would. Yeah, and it's. It's measurable, which is great.

Adam Shaffer:

Right, you can measure the performance of it so with I don't know the number is like 2.5 million three-piece sellers out there, um and and I'm sure you know there's the tip of the spear that you know does most of the business, but there's so many sellers on Amazon and so many categories that become so competitive. Is it too late for somebody new coming into the game to be successful on Amazon?

Andy Craig:

I do not think so, because we're constantly working with new brands, because you know, like you said, a lot of those agencies. They only want to work with brands of a certain size when, with my background as a seller, I've been there right. So I like helping these new sellers get there. We recently launched a new seller we're training on Amazon. We're training them how to do their own PPC, and they ran out of stock on Amazon. We're training them how to do their own PPC and they ran out of stock, which is not a good, you know, not a terrible problem to have.

Andy Craig:

But they doubled their sales within the first month. Second month they ran out of stock and their tacos which is, you know, that total advertising cost of sale, which is a good reflect of profitability went down right. So they just launched their product and they're in the right niche. And for those of you that are listening that have launched a product and it didn't work out, it's not the end, launch another one. We work with brands that are doing eight figures a year, that have products they launched that just don't work. You want to pivot, launch another one and keep testing things launch another one and keep testing things.

Adam Shaffer:

So it also goes back to what kind of product would you launch if you were going to do one today, for yourself or for a partner? Because for me it's like. I love selling stuff on Amazon. There's the thrill when you see your product start to sell, but there's something about a product that people have to use over and over again. And the subscribe and save stuff is, to me, awesome Because you can actually potentially lose money to bring in a new customer if they're going to spend X amount of dollars with you in the future.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, we're working with a client right now that's launching a new product and it's just they found the right niche. That's kind of at the beginning of it, but we're seeing the search volume trend on Google. We're seeing the search volume trend on Amazon constantly going up and there's no huge competition there. That has 20, 50,000 reviews, so now's the perfect time to get in there. So when you're choosing the product, it's all about the research, the demand, the competition, because the more the competition, the more you're going to need to spend to get ranked and to get profitable, and it depends. There's also a bigger upside the more competitive spaces have a lot of demand and people looking for it, but it might take you a little bit longer to hit that profitability.

Adam Shaffer:

I mean, I think it's shocking if people knew how much money was spent on products. Until you're in the biz you don't really see it, but I think the number is something about $650 billion a year in gross merchandise sales through Amazon. So it's such a great platform for you to mess around with. I mean, if you're going to go start your own business somewhere and say you're going to start a retail store, you got to go find a location, invest in leasing the store, invest in fixing up the store, then invest in inventory to put in the store, then man the store and Amazon gives you this platform and Amazon could be friend or foe, but they don't make things easy, especially for the small guys. But I just think there's huge opportunity there. So I'm glad you still see that.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, it's, you know it. The barrier to entry is so little you could. You could order 10 products and launch them and just test it and see if it works, see if there's a demand for it, and you don't have to order maybe a whole container full of products or multiple containers for Amazon right, but if you're working with a Costco, you need to have quite a bit of stock, right.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, yeah, no. And also I don't know if you run into it Maybe you do, maybe you don't in your business. But, like, brand protection is kind of important these days because you talk about Costco and then you have these arbitrage guys go to Costco, buy stuff and break it up and sell it on Amazon, depending on the sale. So there's a lot of policing that has to go on with your brands. I don't know if you do that or not, but what do you see out there on the brand protection front?

Andy Craig:

Yeah. So we've been hit a couple times with people jumping on some of our brands listings and there's not a ton you could do about it. Amazon doesn't always protect you from it, but there's a couple of things. Right, you have to be brand registered to get your trademark in Amazon system, yeah, and then you can sign up for the Amazon transparency program so you could add that extra QR code label to your, to your products, to show Amazon like hey, these are mine, those other ones are not. Let's get those guys off of there.

Adam Shaffer:

Transparency is big. We have a few partners now that are doing that and it's definitely helping them a lot. There's a lot of work to have to go into getting it going, but once you get it going it definitely helps. You know, because there's folks bringing stuff in from overseas. There's people buying used and selling it as new like.

Andy Craig:

There's all kinds of scammers out there, and protecting the brand is, if you want, if you want to increase your conversion rate, get the scammers off your listings when you can so I always tell my clients to like, when they are starting their wholesale of their business right, wholesaling it to other companies, to retail stores, to make sure there's an agreement in place to let them know hey, you cannot sell these products on Amazon.

Adam Shaffer:

So we talked about conversion a lot, but give us Andy's top three or top four ways to increase conversion rate on an ASIN.

Andy Craig:

So when we work with new clients, we're going to audit the account. We're going to see there's a lot of different areas, but sometimes the simplest thing is they're just going after the wrong keywords. Right? If you're targeting super broad areas and you're not hitting those longer tail keywords that are specifically describing your product, you're not going to convert quite as well. So let's make sure we're targeting the right keywords and then let's start working on the other things.

Andy Craig:

Right, the listing, the reviews, the price point. Those have the biggest impact the main image, the title, the price point, the reviews. And then we go into the listing, build out those secondary images, the A plus content, the copy, and even add in videos into the listing have a huge impact because nowadays people love watching videos. So get some user generated content, put that in the, you know, under the videos, right underneath your main images or even at the bottom, right above the reviews. Having some video reviews in there are another impact to it. So it kind of each part of the listing, each part of it kind of impacts it a little bit differently, but they all work together to increase that conversion.

Adam Shaffer:

So it's definitely do your keyword research and make sure you have kick-ass content right, like that's going to be it. And it goes back to why would people feel that I need to go spend money with an agency to help me with this stuff? And for me, it's like Amazon has become so competitive and so mature and they have so many tools and it changes by the minute, like there's something new every day. We come in. We're learning something from the community and we're learning something from doing it that things change. You have to be great at everything.

Adam Shaffer:

So, whatever the discipline is whether it's logistics, whether it's the content creation, whether it's the way you handle customer service and now the advertising these are all different disciplines. You can't be great at everything. And if you want to be great at everything, you've got to get a great team. And if you want to be great at everything, you got to get a great team. And so I just see that the reason that companies like yours exist is because PPC is a rabbit hole. Man Like you could go and spend a lot of time on this and it's still not enough time, so I don't know what your thoughts are, but I think that it's so competitive right now. You got to be so good at every part of this thing.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, and you got to think about it of like a cost of your time perspective too, for a lot of these brands, because they may spend a ton more time on their ads than I would and we're going to give them a better result than they would get on their own. Just because this is what we do, this is our expertise, what we do every single day, let them focus on the brand growth, launching more products, and let agencies or other experts handle what they do best.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, yeah. And so I think that if you're in the biz, you should definitely see what it's like to work with others, because you'll benefit from the help, whether it's going to open up a lot more time for you or it just gets really complicated and you want to make sure that somebody is watching your advertising on a regular basis, which you're spending money. So you know, I think it's it's worthy for you to do that. I think if you suffer on the logistics side, you should find a logistics partner to help you there too. So I just think that if you're great at building products, try to focus on that and get people to help you with your other stuff.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, and people also. There's a people miss, right. I'll work with clients about all right, how do we grow? I'm like let's launch another product, let's launch, you know, maybe multiple multi-packs on where we're at, but also let's expand to other Amazon marketplaces because we already have proof of concept. Let's kind of go into Europe, let's go into Asia, let's go into Australia, these different markets on Amazon.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, no for sure, especially if you're not doing. You know Canada and you're you know and you're selling in the U? S. You should, because you don't really even have to put products there. Amazon will do the heavy lifting in Mexico and now Brazil. I think is like that, so sure.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, and you can test it out through the. Uh, what is it called? Yeah, and you can test it out through the. What is it called?

Adam Shaffer:

the NARF program North.

Andy Craig:

America Remote Fulfillment and if you start to see good results, then just ship it directly into Canada FBA, because you're probably going to do a little bit better that way.

Adam Shaffer:

It'll definitely do better, but it's a great way to test and see if you should be in the country or not. And that's another aspect is managing your inventory in other areas.

Andy Craig:

So it gets a little more complicated. Yeah, and you definitely want to look to see what kind of different laws that Canada has and what different requirements they're going to sometimes require you to have French on your label and things like that.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, for sure. So, but it's definitely. Again, they go back to the world outside of Amazon. If you wanted to launch your product in other markets, other countries, it's not super easy, but on Amazon you could flip a switch for the most part and you could be there and it's pretty cool. They do the translations on the page. They'd help you with the currency conversion. It's awesome. So, again, I'm a big fan and I definitely agree with you that that's something you could do to help grow your business. So with that we're to start wrapping it up. But I just wanted to make sure that if there's any words of wisdom you could give the audience any words of inspiration, bring it on, man.

Andy Craig:

Yeah, so I'll kind of go back to it. I'm a numbers guy, this is what I focus on. So if you're not tracking all your metrics, it's hard to make a plan to do better and to hit those next goals. So, whether you're using a software or manually extracting it from Amazon, track your numbers over time, set goals and run different experiments and tests to see what's going to hit that next metric that you're trying to hit.

Adam Shaffer:

Cool, and if any of the audience wants to reach out to you and learn more about working with you or just ask you questions, how can they reach you?

Andy Craig:

Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn. You can find Andy Craig on LinkedIn. You could go into my YouTube channel. I have a ton of content there that's going to be youtubecom forward slash at the Andy Craig and then I believe that's what it is, and then you could also email me, andy, at ad-habitcom.

Adam Shaffer:

Awesome, great. Well, I really appreciate you being on the show today. You're a wealth of knowledge and you're a great guy. Thanks for your service to the country. Also, I always love talking to veterans, so thank you for your service there and thank you for helping all the Amazon folks.

Andy Craig:

Thanks, Adam. Thanks for having me. I had a great time Great.

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