You're giving this away to our listeners for free? Goodness

By the end of 2026, Amazon Australia will represent 25% of

Wow, that's huge. What KPIs matter most

ROAS, really, really important. Total ROAS, in my opinion, even

If you've got all these big brands coming into Amazon, are

No, that's not going to happen because it hasn't happened in any other markets. You

just have to be maybe a little bit clever about your category. What

are you going to be selling? We did a bit of research on one of my guys and

they were selling equipment for aged care facilities. That's

I'm Matthew Fraser and this is Amazon Ecom

Secrets. I'll be sharing with you the secrets that helped me go from

millions in debt to an eight-figure entrepreneur. If

you're ready to escape the nine-to-five and live life on your terms,

let me show you the way. On today's episode, we're joined by Martin

Hilleberg, a highly experienced Amazon expert and managing

director of 2020 Consulting, an agency specializing

in helping sellers be seen on marketplaces and

grow their bottom line. With over 14 years of experience, Martin

has achieved remarkable results for his clients. And

in this episode, he breaks down the essentials of

PPC that every seller needs to know. KPIs that

matter most, click through and conversion rate, FAQs, common

mistakes, and the best kept secrets in

Amazon advertising. Let's dive in and learn from an expert who

knows how to make PPC work for Amazon sellers

of all levels. What do you mean Amazon verified partner agency?

Why it's important is because We basically

work quite closely with Amazon Australia. We

get invited to events, we hold talks with them. We

were just invited to Amazon Seller Summit. It kind of just shows

that our team has gone through certain training and verification from

Amazon to get the Amazon Verified Partner. So you can be

an Amazon Sponsored Network Partner, which is one set, and

then you have Amazon Ads Verified Partner, which as

we both know, you have Seller Central, but then you have your Amazon Ads

and Campaign Manager. They're two different systems. And

same thing works with the verification. So you actually have to go through training for Amazon ads

to go through that first. And then you open up your accounts, your client accounts to

Amazon. They go through to show that you actually are running campaigns.

And then that's how you become verified. You got to prove to them

that you're doing it. Yeah. So you can't just make that up. And then

you have to re-sit training for the team every year. It's

very similar to Google certification. And I've actually done Google certification because

in a previous job, 12 years ago, when I

first moved to Australia, I was a campaign manager at

Google and running Google campaigns on behalf of

Census, Yellow Pages, White Pages. And we

had to sit that training, and that training was easy compared to Amazon's

ads verification training. So that's

kind of where we as an agency, there's boxes that we need to tick

because we do, if I talk about 2020 as a

whole, like I come from agency media background.

So I spent, before I started 2020, I spent 10 years working

in the media industry. So I ran, I was a digital specialist. I

worked for some really big agencies, but some really big clients, to

name a few. So Adidas, Holden,

Dan Murphy's, and the last agency I worked for, I'll

give them a little shout out, which is Stratosphere. There

I was the head of digital for Chemist Warehouse. So I came

from a very, very retail performance-driven client and

also sitting in supplier meetings. So supplier meetings means that

when brands sit with Chemist Warehouse to negotiate, OK,

what stock are we going to take in? How much will you spend with us?

What price can we get, et cetera? And I thought that was really interesting to

see how tough the negotiations could be. and

what it means to brands and their bottom line. So that's

when I then started looking at the digital space. And I actually, we didn't start

as an Amazon agency. We started as a market, we are still a marketplace agency.

I know that you mentioned that a few times that there's other channels. So

we actually started with eBay. And then Amazon, we're

announcing it coming. So we, of course, added Amazon. But we also

do the Iconic, Qantas, Frequent Flyer, Woolworths, Kohl's.

So someone can actually come to you now as an agency and if they have an eBay

Within the one agency? Within the one agency. So

we have built out the specialist teams in terms of around all

these. Because as we know, the complexities of Amazon is

one of the most complex out there. You have your seller central, that's,

you know, really old technology and just, you know, navigating it can

take time and working things out. And you have Amazon ads. But

then, you know, eBay is now adding on their retail media section

or their ad section. So is Kogan, so is Catch. So

it's kind of growing here. You have Walmart as well? We do Walmart, we

do Macy's, Amazon. Wow. In

the U.S., they've taken a different approach. In Australia, we

have 55 marketplaces or more. In the U.S., it was Amazon,

Amazon, Amazon, Amazon. But what we're seeing now is these big

retailers with huge databases are

opening up to create their own marketplaces to kind of start competing

with Amazon over there. And it's working. Walmart's grown quite

significantly. So it's like, it should definitely be on anyone's radar. If

That's exactly what I've done. I started with Amazon because

it was the biggest platform there. I

actually went from Amazon into Shopify because

I made the move. Well, first of all, Amazon shut

me down. You hear this a bit? Shut

my account down. In hindsight though, Martin, that was

actually the blessing. Because when I first did my

Amazon training, it was like, hey, Amazon's the best thing ever. You just get

to Amazon so easy. I thought, oh, brilliant. I'll just do that. But

then shortly into that, I got suspended for, I can't remember, maybe

too many returns or something. I can't remember. But

I realized at that point, I can't have all my eggs

in one basket. So then I thought I

was probably doing about 200,000 a month or something like

that at that stage. And

obviously, having all my eggs in one basket was a problem. But

what I realized too was, hey, if people are coming to Amazon to buy this product,

maybe if I showcase it to them to their face

through Google or at the time it was actually more Facebook, maybe

they'll buy it. So then at the start, I did ClickFunnels

and then I was using Facebook ads. And that kind of then just end

up snowballing into then replicating that through other countries,

UK, Canada, etc. And then during that early phase

too, that's when Amazon Australia opened up. And

so when people come to

you, is it mainly for Amazon? Is that still like the biggest

The shift has happened in the last two years here in Australia where Amazon's now,

you know, They're not delivering on that delivery promise. They're not

delivering? They are. That's the biggest shift I've seen in the last two years is

when we first started, and when we first started in Australia, everyone

told me that Amazon have failed. It's not a good experience.

A lot of stocks coming from the US. But what Amazon

have done here is incredible. They've built up warehouses in

every single state. They have at least three now. And the

delivery promise is real. You order something on a Friday, you're sitting

on your couch on Saturday, maybe a little bit hungover, and all of a sudden you

And that's the switch that's happened. Over the last two years, that delivery promise

is still so strong now. So clients

of prospects that we've talked to, managing directors, four

or five years ago, they weren't asking how, they were asking

why should we be on Amazon? They're now calling back saying, how

did we get on there? And that's the shift in terms of Amazon

is now opening the doors for a lot of conversations. And then what

happens with us is we get people going, get them set up

the right brand and all that and keep on working on that. But then also adding

on additional channels that make sense for that brand. Because I

don't believe you should go the shotgun approach. Be

And so what sort of client comes to you then? I mean you just mentioned before like

directors or something I think you said. Does that mean you only deal with

you know, clients that are, you know, doing $10 million plus, or

It has shifted in the last two years, just because in

terms of the strategic approach as an agency, but we do

work with, you know, certain startups. And when we say startups, it's

more like they might have a couple of years of trading, they're

actually doing it more full, they're doing it full time now, it's a real business to them.

That's kind of our qualifier. We have

been kind of, you know, Amazon will come to us from time to time and say,

hey, we have this brand that we believe in. They've kind

of part of our incubator, et cetera, et cetera. Like one of

them is called Bay Juice. It's like an anti-hangover drink,

Korean pear juice. Done extremely well here in Australia. They've

kind of also got ranging in like all the major supermarkets and

et cetera. So those type of brands we kind of want to work with. But

most important qualifier for us is are your

brand, because we ideally only want to work with brands, because we

want to be able to help you in a way we have access to

brand registry, which we all know, unlocks brand tools

So that's just let me pause you there, Martin, because, you know, someone

who Traditionally, it was a bit

like me. I started off with one product. I created a

brand name. I trademarked it. Perfect. But

I guess in hindsight, it was just a name that I just

made up. I didn't really have any collateral behind that. I didn't have

a Facebook page or anything like that. So how would you qualify then

someone, you know, if someone came to you like, like me back

in 2018, would that be classified as a brand? You say,

Oh, I've got a trademark on a product. Would you say, Oh, that's a brand. We'll take

If you were brand new with no sales history, we might not

work with you, but I might give advice and help you. I'm

very much like, you know, I get into

a conversation, I hear someone's problem, I want to solve it. I'm

very male in that way, as my girlfriend hates it at times, so

I'm trying to be quiet. I really want

to help, and I just see this opportunity for brands, and I know that

sometimes you leave them with two, three, nuggets that you've

learned over 10 years. And it's not just me. It's not my team. We

just share information. And if I can share something to get you bypass headaches

for the next three months, I will do that. But in your case, like

you mentioned, you were doing revenue. You have proof there. Our

approach is, OK, let's do an audit first. Before I start charging

you money or anything, let's do an audit. Where are

you at today? And can we actually have an impact? If we couldn't have an impact, I

would just be honest. Hey, I think you're doing really, really well. we're not good enough

to help you. And then that's an honest conversation. But if

it's an opportunity to grow up together, then I'll be like, yeah, Matt, like

this is what it looks like and this is what we found. Let's try this for the next six months.

Okay. So basically, so you take some of these newer brands,

which you mentioned, like the drink, for example, and do

you find now that some bigger brands, I think you're kind

of alluding this before, they now want to be on Amazon. So

they're coming back to you, hey, we used to advertise in TV and

sell through our coal stores or something. Now

we want to be on Amazon. Have they got someone who's

doing Amazon for them and then they come to you for ads or do you handle

It's a mix. It's a mix depending on the organization. We've done

some consulting for Mars. And then

it's like they usually have an internal team because globally they

understand the opportunity Amazon represents and also importance of

representing your brand. These companies spend

billions in advertising. Why wouldn't you make sure that your A-plus content,

your imagery, everything around your brand is consistent? But

they might come to us and say, OK, now we need help with ads or

Amazon DSP, which is like the other form of advertising with Amazon,

because we kind of combine it. And just for those who don't know, what does DSP mean?

It's Demand Side Platform. It's a way of

using Amazon's audiences. So not just sponsored ads,

but also using the audiences to You know, Amazon has very rich

data about you as a shopper, what you consume, etc. So in

median, we kind of build these audience groups that then brands can,

you know, target and use certain creatives. If

anyone's watching Prime Video at the moment, a lot of doses are

driven through DSP when you're getting ads served through there. You

don't have to be a seller. Some brands just want to access that rich

You just opened up something I didn't even think about, Martin. The

Prime TV. Yeah, yeah. So do you do ads

on that channel? Yes. You do? Yeah, there's opening up.

And so how does someone then I've never advertised

on there. I wouldn't even know the first thing about advertising on their channel.

So do you have to be, I'm presuming you've got to be on

the Amazon platform selling a product in order to be able to advertise there or

No, that's the thing. So if you're watching Prime Video,

you'll see that there's insurance companies running ads at the moment,

sports bets unfortunately has already jumped on as well. But

the word and everything has different words but it

means the same thing. So you have endemic Brands, endemic

brands means you're a seller on Amazon. Non-endemic, you're

It just doesn't roll off my Swedish tongue either. So it's very annoying. But

I basically said non-sellers or sellers. But

brands will come and say, we're doing this big integrated campaign,

and we want to make sure we're running very, very relevant ads. So

I've been watching Amazon Prime and a bit of SBS. And at the moment, Queensland

is running a lot of messaging around consent. And

again, they would have then gone and said, we want to run specifically state-based messaging

for Queensland. We want to use these audiences. And that's

how they can use DSP and then access Prime Video. Wow. Yeah.

That's amazing. Yeah. So it's a bigger scale, like you're looking

at spending a lot more, but these are usually for bigger, more established

sellers or brands. We're kind of going, you know, we're kind of maxing out

our sponsored ads. How can we put it more into the funnel? So

if you look, think about a funnel as a pyramid, the bottom is

the, you know, the performance, that's where the conversion happens. What's happening and you

need to start, keep on filling up. It's like prospecting for an agency. You

have to be out there. You have to kind of do podcasts or talk

to industry people or whatever you're doing, EDMs, just

adding into the top funnel. DSP can do that, but also

educate. But it's just more relevant because you know that, hey,

these million people are shopping in the baby category. They're watching baby

content. So they know they're relevant. So when they're running ads, it's

If you've got all these big brands coming into Amazon, are

they going to price out any If

someone's thinking about, hey, I want to sell on Amazon, sounds like Matt's

making money. I want to do that too. But

is there still a window of opportunity, you think? Or is

No, I don't believe. That's not going to happen, because it

hasn't happened in any other markets. So, you have a brand, you

just have to be maybe a little bit clever about your category. What

are you going to be selling? I love the fact that you just said before, I

I made my money in medical but actually started in

automotive. My first two products didn't

work out. But the one that became the winner was

And I know because we did a bit a bit of research, and one of my guys

used to work for someone else, and they

were selling equipment for aged care facilities. And

that was, honestly, I think it's still, that's a really good

opportunity in terms of getting the right products, because what

they were doing, they built the brand, they found a

good manufacturer and sourcer in China who created this. Everything

was great quality. But if we talk about, you know, cost

Martin, wait. You're giving this away to

our listeners for free, this information? Goodness

me. This is going to be gold for them. So medical space,

Yeah, potentially. But again, if you're going to go and create a candy bar, don't.

Don't do it. Don't go to Amazon. Mars, Snickers,

Dime, Kit Kat, they are going to steamroll you. Right. Because

you cannot compete. Look, I'm sure I have to eat my words in a

couple of years time. Some will come, hey, here, I created this. That's

great. But then you have other supplements categories, like we've done

a bit of work in consulting for some brands here. In supplements. In

Oh, let's talk about this, because so many people I speak to,

they see the numbers on Amazon, because obviously you've got

the tools, things like Zonguru, et cetera. the

numbers are outstanding, is there still room for

Yeah. They're all

my favorite clients, but one of our proudest case

studies is the company called The Collagen Co. They

specialize in collagen supplements. They're a startup. They're

six years old now, three guys out of Melbourne who

they had a little goal before and a couple other businesses and supplements until

they came into this niche, which is collagen, which is now quite big. But

they've kind of created this incredibly looking brand. I think it looks

Has the collagen to become a bit sort of, it's kind of the, it's the thing,

But you know, they were early on on the thing. So they do

collagen products, they also do meal replacement products, but everything's collagen based.

But their brand looks amazing. They know, you know, they're using, you know,

their channels, their own channels, which is like socials, EDMs, websites.

And for them, they were entering Amazon going, okay, we don't know what to

do, where to start the strategy, we want to avoid making mistakes so

we can get going versus a year from now, we

made the learnings, let's just bypass the learning. So let's work with 2020 to

bypass that. They went

into a category which was competitive. There's a company called Dose

& Co, which is owned or

co-owned by an investor company out of the US, which also Kim Kardashian owns

into. Within four months, The

They're involved in Dose & Co, the competitor. I see. So

that's what I mean. It's not saturated. It's like, how can you work with your

They've been around for five or six years. So not that long. No, but they started selling

Wow, February last year. Yeah. And are you allowed to

give us any behind the scenes numbers? Behind

the scenes numbers? Can you give us top line numbers, like what sort of revenue they would do in a year

I think it's easy to find for your listeners if they know how

Here in Australia? That's

For an Australian brand in Australian Amazon, which Amazon

Australia is very much growing as well. That's what

I was also saying, I've been trying to tell brands or sellers.

Get in today, because in five years time, it's going to be so much more

competitive. And the earlier you can start ranking, the better for

you, even if you're not generating heaps of sales. Yeah, it's still

starting to rank because I read a really interesting stats. Amazon

Australia is going to represent by 2026, end of 2026, 25% of e-commerce sales in Australia. Whoa,

can you say that again? The stat that I read is the prediction is

by the end of 2026, Amazon Australia will

represent 25% of online sales

So if you're not on that platform, you're missing

Exactly. And I think A few years ago, everyone

was like, Amazon's the big bad wolf, et cetera, et cetera. But

they've come in here and created this delivery promise. Convenience

is king in Australia. We do have value shoppers, but more people

shop on convenience. So many of my friends are going, I go to Amazon,

I search my thing, I click Prime. If it's not available Prime,

Right. So that's another key thing. You have to be prime, a prime

seller. Yeah. And so can you explain prime

Yeah. So prime is basically that you're using Amazon's fulfillment services. So

you're sending stock to Amazon's warehouse and in order for

them to kind of fulfill them, if it's next day or same day delivery, And

it has a lot of benefits. And honestly, when we

first started 2020, our first clients were

Harley-Davidson and Crocs Footwear. And we

used to do warehouse logistics for both of them because they didn't have

their own DTC capabilities. And I

was brand new to this world. But looking at the costs of

sending a pair of Crocs from Melbourne up to the Northern Territory

to some regional town, it could be sometimes up to $80 for a $40 pair of shoe.

Amazon is only going to charge you roughly 20% to 25% of your RRP. As a seller? as

a seller. And that's including FBA fulfillment, FBA

warehousing, FBA returns. So it becomes a no-brainer. In

my opinion, yes. But you know, everyone goes, oh, that's such a high fee. And

I always ask them, how much do you get your warehouse, get

Yeah, exactly. And you'll be like a small fish and you won't

Yeah, you need to do like a million orders a year to be even considered

Now, it's interesting because you know a lot about Amazon, not

just from a PPC perspective. Yes, sorry,

we have diverted a lot. But have you been a

No, but I'm very, very passionate about everything we do in an

agency in terms of, I want to understand every single step of the way of

being Amazon. And sometimes, look, I

can be sitting there in the middle of the night, checking like on

the app to see how a new seller, how new seller is going, like, okay, how's

the campaign going? Are we getting the sales? And then I'm sitting there slacking to

the team going, guys, we need to look at this and this and this. So, and

like we said before, Amazon sell is

it's so easy to set up and sell. But we know with

our experience, Matt, is like, man, there's so many things that can happen,

go wrong, or you get whatever. The bot comes in. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. And you get frustrated, and you get the same case message five times. So I've

just experienced it, and I've experienced it with my team. And

I just sit there going, if you want to be an Amazon seller, you

Yeah. Oh, you need so much patience. I would say you need a

lot of patience probably a PPC expert as well.

You must be very, very frustrated with all the... Is there much

changes, I guess, in the landscape? Because when we started, you

know, I just mentioned before that I started doing my own ad in, what, 2017, roughly.

But I outsourced it from 2018. And so I

really don't touch it at all now. And so, has

there been a lot of development over that time? And in particular, has

there been, like, has AI come into the space as

There's, well, yes, there's been a lot of developments. I think the

most important thing, though, is the fundamentals never go away in terms of

your strategy thinking. It's just your execution and then more

tools that you now have available. So it's all keyword based, basically. So

it's keyword, but you still have, you know, a bit more. Our campaign

structure is maybe a little bit different in terms of how we think about it. I

know that, you know, if it's a new seller versus an existing seller, you

have data to go off. If you're a new seller, you

need to, you know, you need to acquire and start learning. Amazon

ads has to start kind of getting data for you to actually have something to analyze. And

that's why, you know, we think very much about if it's a new seller,

we might run, you know, and one thing we would never do is we

never group all products under one campaign. We run individual based

product based ads, because they're

all different, all products are different. And we might

run three to four different campaigns for one product to

make sure that okay, one might be automatic setting, because we're

just trying to get, you know, an insight in terms of

what are people searching? And when are your products popping

up? And when are people clicking on that? Just to see, okay, the

first set of engagement we're gonna have is, you know, a good CTR, that

means okay, targeting is good. It's relevant. And

then are people converting? So if you look at that aspect, it's

like, you know, there's tools and AI's, but I'm like, it's

still very, very manual what my team's team are doing. And like what I'm

doing in terms of reading the data, pulling your search term lists, understanding

Hey guys, I just want to break away from the episode for just one moment and let you know

that I've just launched the Amazon Launchpad mini course. Now this is

designed for people who want to get started on Amazon really,

really fast. But guess what? I can get you launched your first product on

Amazon with just five hours. You just have to click on the link below, join

my community, and the course is absolutely free. All right, thanks

guys, and back to the episode. So it's not as easy as, you know, you see some things

right now. For example, create your own podcast. All

you have to do is just press this one button. It's

No, unfortunately not. Or actually,

it's good that it's not, or else 2020 wouldn't exist. You'd be

out of a job. I would be out of a job. But many times, the solution

you'll find is people go, Amazon system told me, set up an automatic

campaign. Put on your products, put in your daily budgets

and your bids and let it go. You could do that

for maybe a week, but then you need to kind of get in there to

see, okay, where am I wasting money or where am I seeing great success?

I've got a question for you, Martin, because this comes up all the time, particularly with

new sellers. how much money should someone

spend, like per day for example, when

they're brand new, and let's say they've even gone through

the Vine program, they've got some reviews, so the

sales are trickling in. Is there a number

in mind and is it based on their financial

position or is it based on the retail price of the product? Have you got some insight

Well, you should definitely, you know, with any business, you need to consider what's

my costs and then what's my profit? What can you afford? And

if you're a new seller, you know, we have a couple

of slides that we show to our clients just to set expectations. As

a new seller, you know, if you're getting, you might for the first two

months only get a ROAS of 1 to 1.5, so return on

ad spend. And that's just, you know, that's the way the game is.

That's how it is. you have to earn your way in. It's like,

you know, no one picks winners the first time. Of course, you

can bypass some stuff, but you need to start somewhere. But

with Amazon, what we try to look at, we look at ROAS as anything above a

three, we consider good. But you need

to look at the bigger picture. So when you look at your data, you also have total

ROAS. So that's your total return on ad spend, which takes

into account what your whole store is doing. So the way

At the uplift there. And just to clarify, return on

ad spend. And so if you're doing, when

you say ROAS of one, that means you're spending $1 and you're getting $1 back

in sales. Correct, yes. And your ideal is to spend $1 and

That's where we want to sit for Amazon. But then we

also look at the total ROAS. So you might have a ROAS

of three, but your total ROAS is seven, which is

your overall sales based on your ad spend. And

the reason why this matters, and I understand that you might already have organic sales,

etc, etc. But what I've explained to a lot

of most people that are kind of new to this space is Amazon

has an attribution window. An attribution means that they look back at

a certain time point to see, OK, someone

clicked on your ad, and then they bought. For Facebook and

Google and all that, that can be up to 90 days. That's

a lifetime in the digital world. Amazon only has eight days.

So if I come, I click on one of your products, it's day

one or day two, and I buy something 10 days later, that

will count as an organic sale. to you or to Amazon.

But in reality, the first interaction or the, you know, the education,

the awareness happened with the ads. Right. So we have a

way of reporting on the uplifts for both. And what we're

seeing is when you run ads and you get sales

from ads, you also see a return, a total return has been also

And that's important to you as guests, because if you're not getting the attribution,

you can't say, well, that sound came from our ad.

Yeah. So when people come and say, oh, I'm getting five or eight ROAS

on my Google ads, et cetera, et cetera, this is my

Yeah, and that's because Google would have how much attribution then,

You can set your windows from 30 to 90 days, like with Google.

Okay. Which is a long, long time, like, and that's the way,

you know, Google also then, you know, gets people to spend more

because people think that everything is driven by Google. But us

having a conversation today about milk and you

Yeah. Now, I told my community that

I was having an Amazon PPC expert come in

to talk to me today. So first of all, thank you

again. But I've got some questions. I

put it out to the community. I said, what do you want me to ask this guy? Anything. I'm

sure you're going to be able to answer this. This will be like child's

play. But here's the first question. How

should Amazon PPC campaigns be structured for

new versus seasoned sellers? Is it the same?

Or is there something different about whether you're starting out new or you're further

It definitely is a different structure. Okay. The biggest thought for

new sellers is when you start a new ads account, you're

basically starting from scratch, your ads account doesn't have any data. So

what you want to do initially is, you know, don't try and put everything into

one basket, perhaps. You might select a few of your

Ideally, you know... Well, let me just say this to you Martin. Most sellers that

I speak to, they've got one product. They've got one product. They're not launching a

series of products. They're like, we put all of our time, we mortgaged the

house or we sold the car. We've got this one product now

and we invented it. And

Yes, OK. So this one amazing product, what

we try to do is that we have a crawl, walk,

run approach. Basically meaning, don't

go and set up a campaign and put your life savings into

that first campaign. You start small, just to kind of start what we

call feeding the algorithm and getting some data back from Amazon. It

might be as simple as you just set up an automatic campaign with

some restrictions around common sense, negative keywords. Just

What would be an example of like negative keywords? So

let's say I've got a yoga mat or something. Yeah. What

would be like a negative keyword that you would, that would be? I mean, obviously

it varies, but for people that don't know, like what's negative keywords? Something

Yes. So exactly. So if you think about, you know,

in the instance of yoga mats, which is a funny one, but say

Maybe it's a car mat. A car mat. You want to show up

Exactly. So if you have an automatic campaign, it might kind

of identify, you know, other mats.

And this is something you also learn when you get the data back. But if you know something like,

I definitely want to come up for these if it's, you know, yoga mats or no car mats, no

bus mats, whatever it could be, or front door mats. You

can put those as negative keywords, and you won't be popping up for those type

of search terms. And that's a good way to start. And you

don't want to limit it too much, but just anything common sense. It might

be four or five. Don't be too stressed. If you can think of 20, it's OK.

And then you might just, if you are working and operating a slightly

lower budget, you maybe want to start $10, $20 a day

OK, so lower budget would be $10, $20 a day? That's

Yes, I consider that lower. $5 a

day? $5, no, $10 to $20 and maybe

let that run for seven days. You just have

to monitor it to see how things are kind of performing. And

initially you can kind of follow Amazon's bid recommendations

Okay. I think you've made something really, like

a really good point today too, especially for new sellers, which is that

they need to allocate a budget for advertising in the beginning because a

lot of people who are like the mum and dad sellers come through and I

say mum and dad sellers in a good way. I'm a dad, so

I don't mean that in a negative way. That's not a negative word, but you

know, they're not sort of a company so to speak, right? And

a lot of people I see, they come in, they've maybe spent up to $10,000 developing

this product. And they're just like, okay, that's it, I'm launching.

And then it's, oh, hang on a second, PPC. And

you've also said today, don't expect a three row

ass. You're going to have to expect one, maybe two

best for a period of time, which means you're going to essentially be

forking out money. How long would

Unfortunately, how long is a piece of string? This

is where, with your launch, try and think bigger.

Don't let Amazon live in isolation. So if you have an opportunity, if

you have another platform, if it's your socials, if

it's a website, if you have emails, EDMs, make a

big splash around it. You go in and let everyone

know that, hey, this is now on Amazon. And ideally, you

should have it on Amazon prime. So basically, you

know, FBA delivered. Yeah. Because two

things, you are leveraging Amazon's brand

trust. And Amazon is a much bigger brand than

most brands in the world. And they've built, you know, trust around

the whole prime delivery. Yes. So people know that two things, they can

buy it. And if they don't like it, they can return it. And

that's okay, because all feedback is good feedback.

If you have a low return rate, you've created a good product. And

they also show in the reviews. If you get high returns, and

a lot of bad reviews, there's a problem, it's time to go back and look at

Yeah. Okay, excellent. All right. Next question. Yep. How

do you optimize bidding to stay competitive without

How do you optimize bidding to stay competitive without overspending? I think

yes and no. And then it comes down to your business.

What you need to understand, when I say you, it's like you listeners, you sellers, is

what is, you know, what's my costs here? What can I afford? So

if you're selling a $10 product and your cost of goods is

five, and then other fees, etc, etc. Maybe it leaves

and you want to make a dollar return. Maybe you're only allowed to spend 15% of

that budget on ad spend. So you

don't go over that because as soon as you start doing that, you

Yeah, so I just stop you there because this is so important. So

many people come in thinking I

can buy it from Alibaba for

$0.80 and I can sell it for like $10. And then

by the time they do shipping, I'm

going to get it from China to the US or Australia. So

you do shipping, I'm going to do obviously Amazon's

commissions plus fulfillment fees. So it's going to be 15% plus

probably another $4 on top of that. And then there'll be

something else, but maybe it didn't include packaging. And

then they might be left with, even

if they're left with $3, they've got a

30% of the total is their profit. And then they've got

to do advertising. Exactly. And so you could, am I right

in saying this too, Martin, that you could have a product where the one

big could be like $2. So one person clicks on

that ad, $2 is gone. So

And what you said there is really important. Yes, one click is

$2. And your conversion rate might be 10%, which is conversion

rate of 10% is extremely high compared to a website, which maybe sits

on one to 1.5%. But that means that you need 10 clicks

to for one conversion, yeah, which is $20. Yeah, and then you're

selling a product for $10. So the only one winning here

Yeah. Okay. So anyway, the point is to be very careful with just

Cheap products or don't devalue products. End of the day, just

because you're able to source something cheap, like cheaper, and

then you're able to create a brand around it, et cetera, you

know, make sure you like your, your, you know, your pricing,

it's, you know, a few hundred percent and above what you purchased it for.

So you have that, you can actually like have something

Yeah. Yeah. Really, really important that. Okay. What

KPIs matter most for measuring PPC success?

Matter the most? Well, end result is like everyone wants

to get revenue and sales. So we touched on this before ROAS, really,

really important. Total ROAS, in my opinion, even more important. Yes.

Because it all kind of drives for the bigger outcome. Okay.

How do you fix low click-through or conversion rates

Yes, it's definitely possible. So it's a couple of things. What

we look at is you can refine your targeting, your

keywords, your relevance. And as I've mentioned before, it could be,

you know, bringing out, running a manual campaign based on the

top performing keywords that you found. That could be people engaging with them, but

also purchasing. So you run them as a manual campaign. It

could be that you're testing your creative, so A, B, testing your

creative. So we run, if you look at the sponsored ads portfolio, you

have your sponsored ads, you have brand display, and you have kind

of your videos. We try

to run a combination of everything. We found that if we run a combination of

all formats, and we basically own the

real estate, as we call it, on a search, we see much higher

conversion rates. But then it's also swapping out the creatives. One

video, maybe it's not working, or one display is not working, test something else.

I've got another question then, just off the back of that. One of my own questions. Does

your agency also handle the creative? So like if

I'm doing videos, for example, I come to you and say, look, I want to obviously do

video creatives. Do you say, we can handle all

We prefer working with people who come with videos. We can

make small edits, but we tend to leverage

brands, you know, because and usually they have a graphic designer or someone

making it where they go, we know the brand, we know the brand guidelines. 2020, just

give us the specs or in some a little bit of a brief in

Yeah, probably more important for smaller

sellers. Yeah, I guess if Mars is coming to you, they're not going to say, hey, can you

They're not saying that. They're not selling cars anywhere anyway. No

Lucky I'm a Subaru fan. That was great. Yeah. They're

still making cars, but they did drop the STI. Oh, really? Not so

good. Yeah. Okay. Next

question, Martin. How do you scale PPC while

keeping the ACOS, which is average

I think we've touched on a couple of times in terms of it's just making sure that you're

running highly relevant campaigns. And

you can scale says you just have to look at your bid optimizations. And

this is where you know, what we call not a set and forget, you

can't just set up your ad today and then go back and look at it in two weeks.

It's a constant, you know, maybe daily that sometimes maybe

every second day, just looking at I'm scaling, I put

it in more budgets, but also maybe as other competitors coming

in, so I have to adjust my bids. So it becomes, you know, a bit of mathematics,

just kind of looking at and controlling it. But then also, always

refine. So add negative keywords, find other high-performing

keywords, start targeting them manually. And that's how we kind

of keep on kind of feeding this machine. But it's, again,

it's nothing easy here. So, you know, you have to actually check it quite often,

Okay. And I misspoke then too. ACOS is advertising cost

of sales, not average. Now, what

common PPC mistakes do sellers make and

I find that, I think I've said it in

the previous one, they just set something up. They go on Amazon's, you

know, campaign management recommendation, which

is take all these ASINs or products or one ASIN, create

an automatic campaign, put it as a bid, and then just let it

How often should you monitor your advertising campaigns?

Well, it depends on your budget, of course. If you're spending $5 a day,

maybe you can come back and look at it five days later. You

just have to remember the scale of the data coming through. But if you're spending $100, $200, $300 a

day, you need to kind of be checking

And you're just cutting, you know, ad campaigns

No. So the way we do it, I think what we look at

is we run a for one ace and we might be running, you know, three,

four different campaigns with different with different

metrics of success in terms of if we're running a video ad, and

then we're running sponsored ads, and then brand display ads, we

look at holistically, how are they performing together? Because

your video ad might not drive heaps of sales if

you look at it individually. But together, because when

people search for, in this case, collagen, you're

owning like a lot of real estate space on that search. All

people are seeing is this amazing brand. and they might click

the sponsored ads and buy from that, but everything's actually influenced

that buy. So it's so much more that goes into it than

just saying that campaign's bad because the ad causes it

All right. What

is the best? It's a good one, Martin. You're going to

bring out all the gold. What is the best kept

secret in Amazon ads that you have? Um,

are you listening folks? The best kept secret and go.

Um, I think definitely it's kind of the growth of the, the, the sponsored brands

section in terms of really utilizing that so many people just rely

on the sponsored ads, those little shopping ads. Uh,

but there's so much value in terms of running those sponsored displays, sponsored video.

And then when you're hitting a certain, when

your product's booming and you feel like I can't take it any further, that's

when you need to add in Amazon DSP. Start filling in

and finding more people who are shopping in your category, but

I guess these days, I was going to say, why do you think people don't do video ads?

But now though, with obviously AI and

the video tools that are around, you can pretty much knock out a video pretty easily.

Yes, it's a bit easier. Again, it all depends on your own

brand guidelines. It's like, you know, we play around with a bit of AI, you

know, and sometimes it just looks AI. And, you know, but

I'm sure that will kind of improve and then Amazon sponsored

Amazon ads section actually has an AI now you can so if you only have

a hero product image, you can actually run it through that and it'll give you some

lifestyle and kind of help you with that. And also create like a simple

video. So, that's a good place to start because it's free, it's

Now, it's obviously going to be a lot of people listening to this who are new to Amazon or

haven't even started Amazon yet and they're going to want to know more

information. Where can people find information about your

services and perhaps do you have a YouTube channel or something out there that

No, we don't have a YouTube channel. You keep all the secrets for this podcast. Just

for you, it's exclusive. No,

like a lot of our information comes in terms of catch ups

with kind of clients. But, you know, we do share some stuff through

our, you know, through our website, which is, you know, 2020.com.au. But

yeah, maybe I should start a YouTube channel. You could start a YouTube channel. I don't want to compete

Yeah, the best tips on PPC. But you do more than PPC though,

right? You do a whole range of things across all these different platforms, Amazon, Walmart,

So Google, we don't really do Google PPC, but we've been experimenting

or running a lot of TikTok at the moment. TikTok, oh my goodness.

Can people now go on to TikTok Australia? Because I've heard that only

Yeah, it's not available here yet. So UK, US first. But

Australia is very much usually a test market for tech companies. So

Facebook will test a lot of new features here in AU first,

because we're very similar to the Americans. But it's

a smaller market, so it's easier for them to control. So I wouldn't be surprised if

No, we're mainly using it not for the shopping side of it, but

to work with influencers or run ads that drives to

the Amazon platform. For example, Here's a good tip.

If you do have brand registry and you're selling in US, you

can then leverage Amazon's kind of

brand referral program. So if you run an

ad or you work with an influencer and you drive traffic from that

channel to Amazon and they purchase, you can get up to 10% discounts

Yes, but this is separate. If you actually go in and look into the seller central, I

can't remember the exact where to click on it, but it's a different

section, but it's like an affiliate, but you have to have brand registry to

Okay. And I want to also get your thoughts just finally on

Teemu. Teemu. Yeah. What do you think about that platform and are

No, we don't work with Teemu. It's

an amazing app that they built. And it's almost like

being on the pokies. I don't play pokies, and I find it really distracting. I

believe Teemu, this is my prediction. I don't

I think there will be a lot more restrictions in the future on Teemu, just because

of the court cases coming out for the counterfeits. Doc

Martens was one of the first ones to sue them. I've bought some

what's supposed to be HP headphones and

they looked okay, but they were completely wrong and didn't work. So

a lot of crap is coming out of it. And I think

Amazon will find, I think they're only working on an alternative to

a team competitor. But the team is not going away. You can

You can? Okay, I don't know. Let me just say this though. From

a seller's perspective, we kind of get a bit whingy about

the high bar that Amazon sets for sellers. But

from a consumer point of view, that's great. Because you

know that when you go to Amazon, you're not buying fakes, counterfeits.

You're getting real legit products, quality products,

and Amazon's going to stand behind those products. Obviously, if it's no good,

you can send it back. People hate

buying counterfeit stuff, especially if they know that they're expecting it real. Hence

Yeah, definitely, if you're looking for something real. And

that's the thing, we just said, it might be difficult for a seller

on Amazon. And that's the thing, they always put the shopper first. That's

how they built what they built. Because, you know, without shoppers, they

You started off in the beginning of our conversation with Amazon has

built up a lot of trust. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons. Yeah. Yeah,

amazing. So I'm going to just finally say

we can find some more details about you on your 2020 website. Yeah,

we'll leave a link to that in the in the show notes. I want to say

thank you so much, Martin. You gave away so much gold today and appreciate you

Thank you so much, Matt. It was really, really nice to be here and some great questions and

Thanks for tuning into Amazon Ecom Secrets. If

you enjoyed this episode, the best way to show your support is

to give a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and

make sure to subscribe on YouTube so you don't miss an

episode. You can also find more at I'm

Matthew Fraser on all social media platforms. Thanks