Podcast transcript
Introduction
Welcome to the marketplace masters, the podcast, where we go beyond the surface and dive deep into the strategies that help Amazon agencies and account managers truly move the needle.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today we're tackling one of the biggest and often most overlooked opportunities in agency advertising, namely the arbitrage between Amazon Ads and Google Ads. Amazon agencies have been leaning harder than ever into Amazon's ad platform, but rising costs, suffering competition means returns are diminishing. And at the same time, lower cost, high-intent traffic sources like Google really remain underutilised.
Now, to help us really unpack this important topic, I am joined by Ryan Garrow, Director of Client Solutions at Logical Position. For those who don't know, Logical Positions is one of North America's premier marketing agencies, a Google partner, and a leader in cross-channel growth strategies. So Ryan has built his career helping brands and agencies rethink the way they approach client growth, bringing together the power of Amazon with cost-efficient strategies across Google and beyond. Ryan, it is absolutely fantastic to have you on the show today. Welcome.
Ryan Garrow
No worries. I'm just excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Paul.
Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. I mean, you and I met back at Accelerate in September, and it was actually just a coincidence. I happened to sit with Ryan at his table for lunch, and I just heard him talk about some really interesting stuff. Half of that, I wasn't sort of completely sure what was going on. And so I thought I'd need to invite Ryan onto this series to go much deeper into this particular topic. So really appreciate that.
Before we dive into the conversation, just a note to our audience. I know we've got a bunch of people joining us live. This is a live session, which means, A, things go wrong, but on the positive note, you get to ask your questions. So if you have something for Ryan that you want me to address as part of this conversation, pop it in the comments section on LinkedIn or on YouTube, and I will it in front of Ryan there. All right, let's do this. Let's kick off with question number one, really sort of big picture question here is, Ryan when you look at Amazon agencies today, where do you see the biggest blind spots in terms of how they allocate ad spend?
Ryan Garrow
I mean, there's probably a lot of areas that they can focus on, but I think what I see often is that they almost get tunnel vision on focusing on what they can advertise on Amazon. And it's not bad. There's a lot of, there's a disgusting amount of demand on Amazon. We just went through Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and it is, there's a ton of demand there, but I think it's, it's only getting more competitive. And I think agencies at the end of the day have to get a little more creative in where they're finding some of the traffic to convert on Amazon.
Paul Sonneveld
You mentioned the the piece around obviously, big things becoming more competitive more costly, which then help us understand like the economics right between the alternatives particularly you know we're going to talk about Google a lot but you know how would you explain in layman's terms the the economics of arbitrage or maybe we'll go through an example between say Amazon Ads and Google Ads as you'd apply to a client.
Ryan Garrow
Yeah, so what I usually tell brands and even agencies is they're thinking about traffic and you've got this giant search funnel of everybody that's thinking or might be thinking about purchasing the products you're trying to sell. But generally, you need to build from the bottom of the funnel up. The bottom of the funnel is the people that are looking for your brand, looking for your very specific branded product. And the next layer up, there's a group of people that are looking for the products that you sell. They don't know who you are yet, maybe, or haven't thought about buying from you yet, but that you've got what they want.
And then the next layer up is people that look like they should be interested based on all these signals that we have, the creepy data that we have on all these platforms from Amazon to Google to Meta to TikTok, et cetera, et cetera. And it's figuring out based on conversion rates. Where can you get the best bang for your buck? You know, if a click on Amazon costs, you know, two dollars and fifty cent,s and you're getting a conversion of ten percent, it's costing you twenty-five dollars to acquire that customer. If you can get a click on Google for fifty cents and it converts over two percent, then you're in essence doing a better job of getting the traffic from Google.
So it's really looking at all these different layers and being aware of costs and all these other areas or arenas to get traffic that you can send to Google or send to Amazon for conversion. We first got this idea when I was starting one of my own brands on Amazon so that our Amazon team could play with Ads and figure it out. It was kind of like, well, we don't want to waste a client's money, but we'll waste Ryan's money. Sounds like a great idea. Yeah. Thankfully, I trust our team a lot. I've worked with them for 16 years. I'm like, look, I trust you with my money. I've paid you over the years. Go do your work. Let's see what we can do.
But knowing what the click costs were on Amazon, and then also because we are such a large Google agency, I had all this data accessible to me. And I'm like, hey, look at all these cheap clicks on Google where Amazon's putting some minimum click costs in place. And then when we were looking at the reports within Google, where you're looking at auction insights, we see Amazon all over the place. It's like, why is Amazon constantly in here buying traffic on Google? I get it. But Amazon's also only making fifteen percent in Seller Central for a lot of these. And they were bidding on Seller Central as well as some Vendor Central brands that we knew about.
So it forced me to go look under the hood and realise that Amazon, similar to what Google did and has gotten in trouble for, was putting minimum click costs in place. And so I was in the organic fertilizer space. And I was paying a minimum CPC on Amazon for just general fertiliser terms close to a dollar fifty. And I could get that same search on Google for less than fifty cents. You know, I think it averaged at the time we started doing this about thirty-five cents. I was like, well, why don't I just take Amazon's position because they're buying? I can see them buying it on Google for thirty-five cents. I know that I can take that ad if I want and direct it to my brand page instead of going to the search page on Amazon, and I'll probably pay forty cents. That's not terrible by any stretch of the imagination, considering I have to buy that person once they hit that landing page on Amazon for a dollar fifty, I'll just intercept it.
And so we figured out real quick the arbitrage that Amazon was running was traffic from Google to Amazon, and then they would put minimum click cost on the search pages. And that's only grown. It's gotten more complex over the years. Like many of you in the e-commerce space have probably seen the pullback from Amazon Shopping Ads on Google. So for years, Amazon was buying traffic from Google Shopping. And they would, but because it's a product page or a product, it had to go to a feed to a product page or PDP on Amazon.
And they pulled out, I don't know, six months ago, ballpark. And there was this big conspiracy theory around Amazon just doesn't want Google to have all its data. And I'm like, Amazon doesn't care about the data. They all have all everybody's data. It's not, that's not part, that's not difficult or, you know, mind, mind-blowing that Google would have almost all the data that Amazon has. It's money. It's always driven by money. And if Amazon was getting enough clicks to cover the cost of the traffic from Google they would a hundred percent still be making money on the arbitrage. And so I think that they just weren't getting as many marketing clicks on product pages on Amazon to justify the cost of the traffic and the effort of the team
Paul Sonneveld
That's really interesting. Finding now, obviously, you started this journey a while back, but yeah, you start to what extent does this opportunity obviously, Amazon's pulled out. What does this mean for agencies and people like yourselves in terms of this arbitrage opportunity with Google? Like have as Amazon's dropped out, have you actually seen some of those CPC costs come down? What have you observed so far, or actually has been no noticeable difference?
Ryan Garrow
I mean, there were certain areas that the CPCs came down, but I think people overestimated how much Amazon was paying per click. I think Amazon was really doing a good job at grabbing inexpensive clicks that were maybe not as relevant, but were there and the Amazon name on the ad helped. I think they just went for breadth, and it was a lot of spend, but conversion rates on Amazon are so much higher than they are on your website. you know, I was getting, and we've exited the business. So I'm talking about even two years ago, we were getting twenty to thirty percent conversion rates on non-brand traffic on Amazon.
And for me, that's a very large number compared to all my experience with Google, where two, three, four percent on non-brand traffic maybe ten to twenty percent on brand traffic on your websites reasonable it's going to vary across all this so you can't blow me up on LinkedIn about some of my numbers. But on average with i think we have fifty thousand merchants in our MCC on google. It's just, it's fascinating what we're seeing on it. And I'm not seeing it at scale on Google Shopping costs going down.
I think there were so many merchants that pushed into that. And when we have some economic headwinds here in the US, it becomes a little more problematic for brands that maybe have the pie in their industry is shrinking and to keep it, the market share they have or keep the volume they have, they have to get more aggressive on Ads. And so you're taking your, many brands are taking a lower return on ad spend on some of their traffic to keep revenue up. And so that's causing click costs to go up. So I think most merchants, maybe there was an expectation that, Ooh, Amazon's out.
I can jump in there and get some really cheap, inexpensive traffic. That's not really been the case. And they stayed in a lot of the search Ads because they're landing Search Ads off of Google are landing on category pages where there are Ads everywhere. I mean, if you go to Amazon, especially on your desktop, you can see where it's, hey, there's the brand ad at the top. Then you have a whole row of shopping Ads at the top that are sponsored. And then you'll have a row of non-sponsored. And then you'll have usually another row of sponsored. It's feeling more and more like Bing as far as the ad placements all over the main pages of Amazon.
Paul Sonneveld
So, I mean, you mentioned around kind of the cost, right? You know, it's a pretty simple formula in terms of, you know, clicks and then conversion. I mean, these are the two ones and all that. But when it comes to sort of measuring the ROI, is there anything else to it? I mean, are there any sort of secondary benefits? I don't know. Does Amazon still reward kind of external traffic to your page? And also sort of related to that, what tools do you use to actually measure this properly? I mean, do you get into Amazon attribution? What does it look like in terms of getting some hard numbers here?
Ryan Garrow
I think most companies selling on Amazon should be brand-registered. Like if you're a pure play retailer, there's some stuff you can be doing on Amazon still, but Amazon is really making it obvious they want brands and they're giving brands a lot of benefit. They're getting special ad sets. And so being brand registered does allow you to get credit for traffic to Amazon. If you're investing your money on sending traffic to Amazon, Amazon does give you a return on that sale. So instead of paying maybe fifteen percent to Amazon for that sale, you'll pay five. So that's an important metric to be aware of. You've got to be brand-registered for that, which means you have a trademark and the name is on the product you're selling.
But you also have to be aware that Amazon's I'll use air quotes on this. So if you're listening, you can't see that. But air quotes, Amazon SEO is largely due, and it's not in a vacuum, but largely due to sales velocity. The more you sell, the more Amazon makes, the higher they rank you. Like, yes, you have to have the right keywords on your page. You have to do the kind of the basics, just telling Google what you have. But at some point, you cease to have a lot of value of adding another keyword or adding something else to the page itself. And it's more about how can you sell more?
Like I'll have a side note. I have a lot of small brands that will come to me and say, hey, I want to start selling on Amazon. I want to really focus on my page, make sure it's set up right. My products are really designed to sell before I drive traffic. And I'm like, no, just start driving traffic. Amazon has done such a good job of designing pages that convert. As long as you have the right keywords, you're going to get conversions. You got to get the right traffic to get them. You can't bid on unrelated keywords and expect to get conversion rates 10,20,30%. But Amazon's Choice, all the cool badges that help increase conversion rates, the rich do get richer on Amazon.
So you've got to get there quick. And a lot of times you're going to have to invest money. And you might not make a lot. You might even lose a little bit of money on some of those early on conversions. But getting the sales, getting the reviews, and getting yourself in a position where you can start getting Amazon's Choice badges or top seller badges, they will really help. And so that's an important metric that doesn't have often an exact ROI that you attribute because it's difficult to say how much of that sale that you drove from Google, for example, contributed to the exact value you're getting on being ranked number three versus number five in a category.
But I have a lot of plugins on my browsers that I can see sales velocity and sales data on Amazon. Helium10 has some really good data available. So if you haven't paid for that, it's good to just have some of that sales data. But in many industries, the difference in sales volume from the top-ranked product on Amazon, like from a sales number perspective, and the Fifth Bank product, is massive and it's like twenty thousand a month in sales units sold to number one and it might drop down to five hundred sales a month for position five like it is very very different.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, yeah it's a big cliff. So, you talked about some of these benefits, right? I sort of want to look at it in the reverse which is, If you're working with a client, and let's say they have twenty ASINs, right? How do you, like, is there a framework that you use to say, right, actually, these would be good candidates for using sort of, you know, Google Ads approach here, and these ones may not. Obviously, there's a bit of a category lens too as well. I want to get into that first, but are there anything just on the pure product characteristics? I mean, things like existing conversion rates, Amazon choice badges, you know, what is that? Like, is there a bit of a filter you go, These could be good. Let's start here because they've got characteristics X, Y, Z.
Ryan Garrow
Yeah, that's a pretty good question, actually. I would say a lot of that has to come down to the competition on Google. So are there a bunch of your Amazon competitors also would direct consumer sites on Google that they're competing for that traffic so that you have the same competitors on both and they're equally as aggressive? Or are they mainly focused on Amazon and they actually, most of them don't have DTC sites?
So if you're an industry, generally speaking, where there's a bunch of Chinese brands and sellers that just haven't gone into the DTC website, Shopify space, advertising on Google, there might be some relatively inexpensive clicks on Google. And that's where I would probably look first before I even went to Amazon. Because I think anybody selling on Amazon should be advertising on Amazon. And then it's like, great. Are there additional low-hanging fruit clicks we can get somewhere else where you don't have competitors on Google?
And an important note, I guess, on this is you're looking at Google because it's pretty easy to analyse Google because you just go to Google and do some searches. Go incognito first so you get kind of pure results. But you're not going to get in the shopping traffic and send shopping traffic to Amazon. You have to have the feed. You have to have the landing page URL, all these things you can build out.
At this point, I haven't seen a successful way to scale that. You can accidentally get one in there until you get banned in the GMC or the Google Merchant Centre. But the text Ads are where a lot of it can be valuable. And that's where Amazon's already generally advertising. So if you do a search for, name a thing, purple t-shirts, and you see there's some shopping results, but then there's only two spots above the organic where there's text ads, and one of them is Amazon, that is a good indicator to me that there's some reasonable level of arbitrage to be had on the click cost. And you can get cheaper traffic to your product page or to your store page by leveraging an ad where you are Amazon.
And also note that when I say two, that means there's two extra spots because Google puts four spots of ad text potential at the top of each search result. So if there's two of them, that means anybody else advertising on that is not good enough to get above the results because the ad they've designed, the quality score, the ranking system that Google has in their system says, yeah, you're going to be stuck on page two or at the bottom of page one. And so that means it's relatively easy to get at the top and take Amazon's spot from them.
Paul Sonneveld
I have a few follow-up questions there, but one is this idea around intent, right? How do you, cause I'm, I keep thinking about the back of my mind, this conversion rate, right? Like cost may be low, but to your point earlier, like the framework you gave us around, you've got people who want to know your brand, that maybe there's some interested in buying a product that you sell, like those things. How do you go about i mean maybe just a practical example because i'm not in this sort of on a daily basis but how do you get the right how do you how do you sort of discover that right intent keyword there because you you might be able to generate a lot of traffic but you've got no conversion right so and there's this balance right how do you how do you know that you've got a good keyword probably much broader question that applies you know more broadly but specifically when you're advertising things off Amazon so that by general the purchase intent is lower.
Ryan Garrow
Yep. So, like I look at the lens on most platforms of there are two types of people that you care about. The first type, people that already know you, know your brand, like your brand, they're coming back to buy again. They're searching brand traffic, whether that's on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, brand traffic. The other group is looking for your product. They don't know you yet. They're just searching for the product. In my case, we can use the organic plant food that I was selling. If they knew my brand, I could get them on my website. They would convert well. I wasn't worried about that.
I had that add up as a defense mechanism, but I also wanted to be able to measure the growth of the brand based on the other things I was doing. And you can only get clear, hard data from Google if you're advertising. So that was part of the reason we did that. It's also relatively inexpensive. Brand traffic will almost always be profitable unless you have a brand that's like Kleenex. But at that size, you're probably not as worried about return because you're so large.
The other side was like, all right, the term organic plant food. I was launching my brand. I didn't have brand awareness. And I knew that that search term on Google would be a pretty low-converting term, generally speaking. I ran some tests to prove it, but I didn't have a huge product depth. I didn't have a massive name brand that they could trust. I was competing with the miracle girls of the world that have been around for I don't know how many years, but at least fifty. And they could send that traffic to their site.
And there's a built in brand recognition, generally higher conversion rates. So I couldn't make money on that term. So I did test that to Amazon because I was also tagging the traffic to make sure that Amazon saw the non-brand search term to help me rank for that term. And so that was part of my arbitrage model was, hey, this click costs thirty-five cents. It's going to cost me too much to buy it on Amazon to get a profit. So if I can buy it cheaper and take Amazon's place, it makes sense potentially. And then started seeing some of the conversion rates for the traffic I was sending based on Amazon's brand registry, like all the data they can give you for the clicks you're sending into there. Our non-brand traffic didn't change conversion rates much. It stayed twenty to thirty percent, which I could not get on my own website at the time because I was building the brand up. I still probably couldn't even get that on most non-brand searches. there's this trust level of Amazon to be aware of too.
So I guess another little filter I would put on there as I'm thinking through it, less reviews make it difficult to compete on an Amazon search results page. Like if there's a bunch of brands with built-in reviews that already are hitting the thousands and you don't have that yet, ideally, you want to get that traffic from somewhere else where that trust factor of Amazon helps you.
And so that's where I think I accidentally hit something that I hadn't been thinking through originally on that Google traffic was if Amazon's sending somebody to their site from Google to, in this case, my brand, there's a built-in trust there that, oh, this is from Amazon.
I can buy a new brand on Amazon because if I don't like it, I just return it and Amazon's going to give me my money back. Whereas if I buy them from a brand on their own website or my Shopify site that I had, I don't know about that brand. Are they going to give me my money back? Are they going to steal it? I just don't know. So there's that built-in trust there that even with less reviews, they're going to go to my brand page. And a brand page is trustworthy on Amazon. There's not everybody that can get one of those unless you're brand-registered. I think people are becoming more aware of that. And I can tell a better story there about my brand and how wonderful I am and how trustworthy I am, even with my product having less reviews.
And so that's one way to build up reviews. We built up reviews really fast. And once we got to five thousand, I think we were so far ahead of newer startup brands because during COVID, there were a lot of brands that started plant food because we all got locked inside and had to take care of something. So it was like, let's get a plant. They can't give us COVID, so we'll get one. And we just, the conversion rate stayed very high, even with competition coming into place. And they just, they didn't conceptually understand how to compete with our review volume and the velocity we had on sales already. So it was a big help.
Paul Sonneveld
Super interesting. So you mentioned the brand store, right? Which I want to sort of ask about, well, you have an option, right? And I've heard others talk about this, you know, where do you direct traffic, right? And I've seen broadly three versions of this. One is the brand store you mentioned. One is the PDP. I've also heard other agencies talk about, you know, maybe this is more about the intent, but sort of having like, maybe a blog or another, an off-Amazon page in between, that you then talk about your product in the context of maybe the need or the use case and then have a link to Amazon. Obviously, it's another click. Let's drop off there. How do you think about those options and what to use when?
Ryan Garrow
By default, I don't like directing people to different landing pages when the intent is to purchase something. And so a lot of people go to Google to try to find a new brand they want to buy. You're finding keywords that are, I'm not trying to figure out what's the best plant food for this particular plant. That is a little bit higher up the search funnel than I need organic houseplant food. Okay, I know you want it. And so if I send you to a landing page or try to sell my brand a little more before you can actually go to buy it somewhere, that's a little bit of friction that I probably wouldn't want to fall off. And I don't think the upside of having additional data from a tracking standpoint on a website would be worth it. I might leverage that and I'll buy with Prime.
So if you use Buy with Prime on your website, you can have two SKUs. One is the regular direct-to-consumer SKU on your website, on your Shopify site, for example, where I can just go there and buy it. I can also have a buy with a Prime SKU that maybe I can't navigate to on the site, but I can navigate off of it. So I can build a feed around it on Google and drive traffic there that will allow me to use Amazon inventory to fulfill that. That's not a terrible place to be. And I like using that often when I have aging inventory in Amazon. Nobody wants to pay warehousing fees to Amazon if you can avoid it. I think BioPrime is one of the coolest ways to get around that quickly. There's also a lot of perks that Amazon is adding into that buy with Prime that I think are difficult to overlook the more mature it gets within their space.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that is really interesting. Obviously, you're trading off a little bit of kind of trust because you don't buy on the exact side, but you still, it's more trust because you're sort of still telling people, hey, Amazon is super involved in this transaction, all those benefits, and then, you know, avoiding some of those fees. I can see how that can be a very interesting trade-off and playoff there.
I wanted to touch on, I guess, one topic that a lot of us are thinking about before we sort of close out is, the role of ChatGPT, right? Or, you know, AI, both from a point of view, it's probably two angles here and probably two separate questions. One is just, know with so many searches now like no longer kind of starting on Google or maybe starting with Gemini or starting in ChatGPT or in my case, like in my perplexity browser, right? How do you think about the kind of advertising that sort of arbitrage opportunity? how do you think that's going to shape and evolve here? I've got a follow-up question, but maybe let's just focus on that one.
Ryan Garrow
I mean that's probably another two-hour conversation we might need to go get a beer. The ChatGPT and the perplexities and the AI search engines of the world, if you want to call them engines at this point. It is still to a degree the Wild West, and it's still a very small fraction of search. And so I think people also have to put that into context that Google is so much bigger than ChatGPT at this point. And then by default, magnitude's bigger than perplexity still. There's still a lot of searches there that can't be ignored. I think a lot of what you have to do is look at...
Let's take ChatGPT, for example. A lot of my friends have kids that are middle school, high school in the US. A lot of their kids don't use Google. They're using ChatGPT and they're using it for almost all kinds, including schoolwork, unfortunately, but using it for search and understanding what they're trying to find and refining searches and really learning what that's going to be in their world. And I think that there are going to be agreements between Amazon and chat GPT and Shopify. It all comes down to monetisation at the end of the day.
Like what, an interesting point I bring up, specifically when it comes to search and the dominant player, we don't need fifty AI search bots or engines or whatever you want to call them. Just like we didn't need fifty search engines. We basically chose, in the US at least, we basically chose Google. Baidu in China, we have some other ones in Russia, but Yahoo is essentially not even a search engine, but twenty five years ago, they were they were big in the place. Everybody's betting on that being a big place.
So we're probably going to come down to one or two for various things when it comes down to the AI systems and Google. And many of you know, it's not publicly available information. They've been paying Apple twenty billion dollars a year to be the default search engine of Apple products. That's now going away. But that was twenty billion dollars of pure cash that was moving from Google to Apple, that is now no longer able to be paid there.
So Google now has a pile of cash that can't go to Apple, but has to go somewhere. And as of now, they can put it wherever they want, but I can see a world in which they could be paying perplexity. They could be paying some of these other AI systems for access to put Ads on there, be the default engines for certain things to help power things. Now, ChatGPT and the Microsoft investment makes that one probably off their radar. But Google's doing I mean Google's been very quiet about AI, their Gemini product.
Amazon's been very quiet about Rufus. Apple's been very quiet historically about Siri. These have been operating in the background for, I would say, at least a decade. They haven't been public about it because people were scared around, oh, what's Google doing with all this information? And then we found out that even Meta was listening to all of our conversations on phones. Siri and you have Alexa that was listening to everything. Like it's been going for a while. And I think Google honestly is probably ahead of ChatGPT in many areas. They just haven't been telling us a lot about it.
So this is all coming to a very messy, complex head, I will say, in the next one or two years. It's anybody's guess how it's going to play out. But I think a lot is going to come down to resource. And that's one reason I think ChatGPT has to be raising money at such a massive rate because they are so far behind Google's Gemini and the advertising model they have of regular revenue that I don't think ChatGPT can make money at twenty dollars a pop. a month, but they're going to need advertising. And I think Microsoft's already been testing with Copilot and putting Ads in there. So I think the next iteration for Microsoft is putting their Microsoft Ads in ChatGPT. So I think it'll make Microsoft Ads relevant again.
Right now, I mean, we have seven thousand active clients at our agency and many of them are advertising on Microsoft. And it's a small amount, but we are the largest agency in the world because very few agencies focus on that. So there is some arbitrage potential there on Microsoft and Amazon, too, that many companies aren't aware of. Even Amazon's advertising on Microsoft shopping still. You can see some of their Ads there.
So Yeah, that was a very long answer to AI arbitrage. Who knows exactly how that plays, but I think bots buying from bots is something that's going to continue to evolve. We've already seen the ChatGPT Shopify agreement. I assume there's one where Amazon starts kicking money into ChatGPT. They're probably in negotiations and close to that to be able to use Amazon buy with Prime is going to integrate into there potentially and let me buy on Amazon, who knows?
Paul Sonneveld
We should do another one of these in six months because I think we'll have a lot to talk about again. I think it will change a lot. It's obviously moving at a rapid pace.
Ryan Garrow
Oh, it is. And that's where I tell everybody, you have to be testing constantly. I can't imagine being an agency generally that has one single focus on one platform and doesn't think around the other things going on just because we figured out that your DTC site, the marketing doesn't operate in a vacuum. Like it used to be, I would say, ten, fifteen years ago, like Google traffic went there. It didn't impact things. And we also didn't have the insights. I'll say that, too. We didn't have complex attribution models.
Amazon is such a large portion of overall e-com sales, generally speaking. It can't possibly be operating in a vacuum. Like we figured out early on, we can't possibly just be focusing on Amazon Ads. Like TikTok and Amazon are getting close. There's influencers that are sending traffic there. Amazon's paying influencers to do different things. We have partners that do nothing but create content and put that all over the world, almost like a PR company, but they get paid only when they sell things on Amazon. I mean, it's, there are so many ways to drive traffic and so many different parts of the funnel that if you don't do it, you need to know who else does that part of the funnel for you to make sure your clients are taken care of and they're continuing to grow.
Pau Sonneveld
Yeah, which maybe that leaves me with the last question. And I apologise to our audience. We are a little bit over here. But just on that topic, I know Logical Position is a very large, you guys are one of the largest globally in this stuff. But I'm thinking about the smaller agency here, like maybe the ten to twenty people. You know, we're always busy, busy, right? Delivering on clients, sales pitch and all of that. But really what you're saying is you need to continually innovate and take a step back and look at all these things and sort of get that curiosity going in your mindset to work out where the new opportunities are and how to explore them, run tests and all of that.
Any practical advice do you have any practical advice for agency owners or what would it be in terms of just how do you how do you foster some of this mindset in an environment where you kind of always feel like you're behind the eight ball, right? Because i think a lot of i mean you know obviously tuning into this podcast is is you know one one ray of sunshine there but just practical things in terms of how can you stay on top of things and how can you have a disciplined approach of just testing, trialing, and innovating? Probably a really big question, but any gold nuggets you have I think might be quite useful for our audience here.
Ryan Garrow
Oh, yeah. I mean, I was there. I had a team of, I think, eight team when we sold to Logical Position just over a decade ago. So I had that team where we had, I want to say, pretty large, complex e-com clients where we were pushing into other avenues. And so what I challenged our team with constantly was like, we were one of the best in the world at the time. And I think we still are. But at the time, we were handling large, complex Google ads, Microsoft ads, better than almost everybody else. I mean, Google was really helping us meet new brands because of the things they saw us doing.
But because of that, we were also being constantly asked by clients like, well, you know, you're doing well here, but what do you think of this? And I said no a lot, saying, hey, we're not set up necessarily for X, Y, or Z. But we did start doing, for example, some things in the affiliate space and learned a lot of stuff early on. This was 2010, 2011, back when affiliates were really kind of scummy. They were stealing a lot of traffic from brands and we had to put a stop to it.
We started getting into it and helping control it. But it was getting my team together and saying, Where do our skills transfer easily? You have to have bandwidth. You can't bring something on for a client where you just can't possibly handle the workload. But then finding clients where they trust you and you're going to tell them, I don't know what this could look like, but we're going to charge you a fair rate that's going to be below market probably if we're learning something new. But because we're doing so good in this area, you're going to trust us to test this with you. And even some of the newer things, like we just stepped into TikTok on the marketing side and got this great channel partnership agreement there. It is crazy how quick TikTok is moving on evolving internally.
So finding opportunities to test there is really easy to say, hey, client, you need to be here. The lift is relatively low for us. So like, for example, we're not even charging for the first couple of months of some of the things we're doing on TikTok just to say, hey, we need to get you up on here. Cause you need some of this data. Yeah. I want some of the data too, but I really want to help you see if this makes sense. Let's see which of your buyers here start easily on remarketing. And then we can go into some search Ads on TikTok. And then we can start sending maybe some of that search traffic on TikTok needs to go to Amazon. Uh, maybe, I mean, it's not impossible to say, um, TikTok may not like that with the TikTok shop, but again, those are battles you pick later, but there could be some interesting creative ways that you can work systems to benefit clients. And I, that's where I always challenge our teams with is, um, our job, we exist to help clients grow.
And if we're not constantly thinking of new ways that we can test something and building up that trust that says a client, Hey, we had this crazy idea that maybe we should do Google arbitrage for traffic to Amazon. And I was the first client that did it, but it was an easy test on somebody else too. It was like, well, yeah, I'd love to test that here. Spend a couple of grand. Let's see what happens. And I think brands are going to be more and more excited about agencies that are thinking outside the box on their behalf because business owners often get stuck in the business and they don't know what's happening in the marketing world. They don't know that TikTok's positioning themselves in the US to be one of the biggest search engines in the US. And they've got the data and the humans browsing it to make it happen. It's crazy.
Paul Sonneveld
Very, yeah, look, let's leave it there. But that is great advice. I mean, practically speaking, I think what I took away from that is work with some clients that you've got a great trust relationship and essentially co-invest, right? And find way, find money and time and resource then to explore these things and really kind of drive their innovation. I mean, you made a really good point around your clients are probably finding even much harder, right, to think about that. You know, they're running their own business alongside talking to you about Amazon and all these things.
So, great words of advice there, Ryan. Well, we do have to wrap up. I just want to say thank you, Ryan, for coming on the show today. It's been super, super interesting. I'll for sure be re-watching this one in a few weeks' time, maybe over the Christmas holidays, because there's a couple of things in there I just want to go a bit deeper on personally, but Really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much.
Ryan Garrow
No, thank you, Paul. This was fun. Anytime. All right. Take care.
Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone, that wraps up today's episode of Marketplace Masters. Of course, as I said before, huge thanks to Ryan Guerra from Logical Position for shedding light on the hidden opportunities between Amazon Ads and Google Ads. If you've joined us live, I really hope you got your questions answered today and walked away with a couple of fresh ideas. I certainly have to take back to your clients.
And if you're catching the replay, remember you can always reach out and keep the conversation going. Marketplace Masters is all about giving Amazon professionals really practical insights they can use to move the needle. And today's discussion was a perfect example of that. Thank you so much for tuning in. And I look forward to catching up with you as part of our next episode. Take care.
