Podcast transcript
Introduction
Hi and welcome to another episode of Marketplace Masters brought to you by MerchantSpring, the leading Marketplace analytics platform for agencies and investors. Marketplace Masters is all about diving to the questions agencies face to help them serve clients better and scale their businesses.
Paul Sonneveld
I am Paul your host and today we are exploring Amazon's demand-side platform and our agencies can use it to help scale their brands. To help me do this, I've invited Brian Johnson to join us and share his expertise.
Let me take a minute to introduce our Guest. Brian has helped over 20,000 brands, selling over 1 billion on Amazon through Ad strategy and conversion rate optimization. He offers guidance to and partners with brands and sellers, through Amazon's PPC troubleshooting community, coaching, Innovative PPC software professional, training courses, and his flagship, Advertising and Marketing agency, Canopy Management. Thank you for being on the show today, Brian.
Brian Johnson
Paul, thanks for having me.
Paul Sonneveld
Amazon DSP is a really hot topic and, I must admit, I struggle to get my head around it. I can just about explain the Amazon advertising console, in the difference between a Product Display Campaign and Sponsored Brand Campaign, but when it comes to DSP, it just feels like it's another Universe.
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
Pau Sonneveld
So let's get straight into that. In layman's terms, what is Amazon DSP? How do you explain it to your clients?
Brian Johnson
Well so I mean and I completely agree with you is that DSP is rather intimidating because you need special access to get ahold of it. It is far more complex than Amazon native PPC Advertising it has been and still is far more complex, and it's really more of the, to kind of frame it, and I can go through some slides that we'll talk about some of the basics of DSP to help each of you, who are not, maybe not familiar with it, certainly intimidated with it by like, I was originally, and I had to have my own team because my background was primarily the Amazon native PPC advertising.
And so, for me to get up to speed with Amazon DSP was actually after the fact, it was actually after we already had team, there was already managing Demand-Side Platform for some of our clients. Back in the last couple of years and I'm like going like I don't want to, even, get into this thing. But I had to. I had to understand it because ultimately, these kinds of conversations come up and certainly with clients and they say, hey, what about this or should we doing it? And I can't just sit there with a blank look on my face and say, like, I don't know because that doesn't go over too well. So ultimately here's kind of, there's a number of things that I could say on this a number of slides, that I'm willing to show here. But let's start out which is kind of a really high level overview as far as DSP.
So, DSP is Amazon's secondary display advertising platform. So, most agencies most Consultants, most Ad managers are familiar with Amazon's native Seller Central, Sponsored Product Ads, Sponsored Brand Ads, Sponsored Display Ads and they've gotten their there's some cells familiar pretty well with those. They've even probably even had experiences for as with Sponsored Display Ads setting up Ads that run for remarketing or retargeting off Amazon targeting custom audiences. Well, Sponsored Display Ads, as far as the remarketing Ads, far as the audience targeting Ads is kind of like the little baby brother of DSP.
DSP is the Enterprise version of this. And so we kind of say that Sponsored Display Ads is the light version of DSP. It's a very, very light paper-thin kind of light version of DSP. That means though, is that Demand-Side Platform or DSP is very powerful and has a huge amount of capabilities if you are working with a right type of client. In other words, I will say that generally the client that we say is a best-fit, we've gotten a lot more, our range of flexibility has increased certainly with experience over the years, but we generally say that, we recommend that you spend at least 10,000 a month in Ad spend.
Frankly, we don't tend to recommend DSP to our clients until they're doing at least a hundred thousand dollars a month on Amazon in overall sales. At that point, it does start making sense. We also look at the products that they're selling in order to determine whether or not it's good fit. Where whether or not we think that the advertising that comes through the DSP platform is a good fit for the kind of products that they sell. Obviously, I just introduce some complexities already.
So kind of what I was just talking about before, as far as just kind of comparing wrapping our head around this. So just kind of comparing, you've got Amazon's native PPC Advertising. The native PPC Advertising is actually, typing is the first three, so it's Sponsor Product Ads, Sponsor Brand Ads, Sponsor Display Ads. Native, as in native to The Seller Central platform. The display advertising or DSP platform also known as the Demand-Side Platform is the demand side, but we're DSP, right? So to kind of frame this in a way, you already probably know is the Sponsor Product Ads are primarily for keyword targeting product targeting, you did include automatic campaigns, and category campaigns.
These you know, being able to have that kind of variation of targeting. Primarily they're designed to be keyword targeting Ads and product targeting ads. Sponsored Brand Ads also keyword targeting Ads, product targeting Ads. You just have some additional assets or different placements on Amazon, that allows you to show your Ads in different way. Get more custom with your images and your creative, be able to show videos that kind of stuff. So it's kind of an expanded version but primarily it's more for your product catalog presentation or your brand presentation, attempting to get new Shoppers to know who your brand is.
Sponsored Display Ads, it's kind of a bit of a mix here. Okay, so introduces it has product targeting but it also introduces audience targeting and remarketing. So with audience targeting, that can be things as far as like lifestyle, it can be demographics, you know? Like it's a female aged between 50 and years old. If you happen to have a product that has a narrow audience that you can pin down to that level. And I'll tell you how to kind of uncomplicate that here in a bit. But it gives us the ability to do a certain amount of retargeting you can run Sponsor Display Ads, both on Amazon along with rest of the Ads.
You can also run it on Amazon's partner sites and there's thousands oft hem out there off Amazon. So that you have those Ads that the remarketing Ads are essentially the Ads were, let's say, you visit Amazon, and you're looking for, what's the thing I just got? It was a one of the, the dash cameras for my truck right to record accidents in front of me, and I can put them on YouTube and be famous, right? For insurance purposes actually. But I'm shopping for dash cams, I did not actually purchase one. I started going off onto other websites and all sudden I started seeing Ads for the one I was shopping for maybe even Ads for other dash cams that I wasn't shopping for all on Amazon and those Ads are just following me around to different websites that I might be visiting. And it's essentially what they've done is, they've identified that hey, I'm looking for this did not make a purchase.
And then now the Ads because your data of where you're going and what your browser is showing with this, they drop what's called a pixel, which is simply like a tracking link or a tracking identifier that allows when you visit another site, if it has an Ad space that can run an Ad, then it'll look at that tracking ID and say, okay, let me go out and pull some Ads that I can show on this website you're now visiting and I can potentially get some Ad Revenue by showing your ad and maybe Amazon, of course, is getting you to come back and buy a product. And so that's kind of like the idea of the Ads showing up on different sites after you've already left Amazon. Yeah, this is not a new thing. This is something that's been around for decades through Google, for instance.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. And actually can I just pulls you on that? Because I want to sort of wants to ask you another sort of a thousand feet question, from an Amazon agencies point of view getting in there, traditionally this is more the domain of like, traditional digital marketing agencies, Google, Facebook, big, programmatic Advertising, big budgets. How is the Amazon's version of DSP kind of different? And why Amazon, as opposed to Facebook or Google, some of the other big platforms out there?
Brian Johnson
Yeah. What's the advantage of Amazon first or what's their take on it?
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Correct.
Brian Johnson
Display Advertising in general is kind of interesting because when they talk about things as far as a Demand-Side Platform or an Ad exchange or programmatic advertising, those are like terms that we don't have in our native education of Amazon ads. And so it's rather intimidating and you think it's like well I'm not going to go back to school and get a marketing degree just so I can learn the terminology here.
Let me break this down a little bit here for you. Demand-Side Platform is a simply just saying, think of basic economics supply and demand. The supply is thousands of websites have a space on their web pages on their website and it's for rent, okay? And there there's Supply is saying like you can rent this space with your Ad.The demand is us as advertisers saying, I want to purchase I want to rent this blip. This particular moment on your website when a shopper that I have programmatically identified in other words that I have identified through their demographics or I have track them coming off of Amazon, Amazon and said, hey this person, you know, shopped for your product, but didn't buy it. I can now run an Ad that I can program that Ad to run for a particular Shopper on other sites, where I've rented a little square on their web pages.
That's the supply of the demands, the supply and demand side platform, and my demand for that Ad space, is the demand that I'm paying for in order to run my Ad. So, as simple as just a bartering exchange, if you will for Ads and for virtual Ad space, on other sites off of Amazon, and I'm programming the Ad where I'm setting the Ad to only show to certain people that I've identified as either know who they are. Because Amazon is told me who they are, or I think I know who they are, because they fit my demographic or lifestyle, or life event, or something, that is related to my product or my brand and I can show them the Ads. And I've got 50 other controls that I can put in there. Things like I only want my Ad to show to this particular type of person or this particular person five times.
Now, I don't know who that person is. It's not like I have their name and address or something that specific. That for privacy, concerns and for e-commerce, in general, that is kept in control by things like Amazon and the exchanges. But the Demand Side Platform allows me as an Advertiser to say, I want to show Ads to this target audience that is more granular, more specific, more customized than what I could on Amazon through just keywords and product targeting. And I can essentially rent space on and have Ads that follow this person around with the hopes that if they keep on seeing my ads will be constantly reminded. As I do, you know what? I really you know I meant to get that. Let me go ahead and just click through and they come back to your site and maybe they purchase your product.
The cool thing about that is it doesn't have to be where they visited your product because Amazon will tell you, hey, you know what, they visited, your competitors product listing. Do you want to run an Ad for them off of Amazon? Yes, I do, of course I do because I want to steal away that customer. Yeah, and so things like Demand-Side Platform, and Ad exchange and programmatic, they sound like big words, but once you finally break it down and you kind of like, like oh that all that saying is like cool, I can rent space and I can target the audience that I want to target. All right. What's with the big nine syllable words?
Paul Sonneveld
So yeah. So actually, while you're on that, I just have one more big word that I'd love for you to explain. And yeah, I watched a couple of YouTube videos, trying to get my as I was preparing for this conversation, and a lot of people are talking about, Amazon has a benefit because it has access to first-party data, you know, it's just a statement up there without explanation. Can you demystify that particular phrase for us?
Brian Johnson
Well, Yeah. First-party data is simply just saying like they've collected their own data. You're not simply just getting, you're not tapping into a pool from an ad exchange from Facebook audience from a shared pixel. They're basically, there is essentially first-party data is Amazon saying, this Shopper has a history of buying these types of products. And therefore, they fit into this bucket of having this kind of standard purchase behavior.
They have in other words, Amazon owns data about that target audience that you want to advertise to and they're allowing you to say like, okay, we're going to pool. We've got 50,000 people who have done something similar on Amazon, they've purchased a similar product, they've considered purchasing a product, they purchased a collection of products because, oh, look, they're, they're expecting a baby and now they're going out and they're buying all these things.
That's a life event, a baby coming. They are located in Austin, Texas, that's the demographic. They just turned 65, they just moved to a new State. There's a number of things that they're essentially pooling or putting a buckets a bunch of Amazon Shoppers. And so they own that data. They're the first priority as far as owning that data. And so that's kind of what they're saying is, as far as, like, the first-party data, is they own that data.
That is one of the main reasons why Amazon DSP is so powerful, compared to Google remarketing Ads, Facebook, pixel, remarketing Ads is because on Facebook, you're essentially talking about social media. Yeah. They're going to have some demographics as far as like age and sex and their connections to other people and maybe even some shopping behavior through on Facebook.
Google will primarily have search information, it's like okay, What are you researching? What are you trying to get to know more information about? But Amazon has that data of what did they actually purchase? What are they looking for now? What are they purchased in the past? What are they most likely to purchase? Because the machine learning algorithms are constantly looking over our shoulders and so Amazon has a significant advantage because they're closest to the the shopping cart and you're allowed to essentially target people with that kind of enhanced data enhanced targeting that allows you as an Advertiser to say it's like, look, I want a reliable reliably show my Ads to people who have a high likelihood of actually purchasing the product that I sell. And so as a huge advantage compared to Google and Facebook and MSN, and there's a bunch of other display Ad exchanges out there.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. No, that makes sense. The closer you get to the wallet and the wall of behavior
Brian Johnson
Exactly.
Paul Sonneveld
The more easily translates into sale at definitely makes sense. And I now actually understand how, clearly Amazon has excess juice, huge amount of data, particularly big markets like in North America and Europe, which is very, very powerful. So let's go back down for the thousand feet view. I think there's been super helpful to set the seed context and actually help me understand what These fees about.
Brian Johnson
Yep.
Paul Sonneveld
Let's go back to let's put our agency as sort of had back home. You mentioned this before in terms of, it's not for everyone, you're only looking for brands with particular characteristics. I want to just dive a little bit further into that, put yourself in the shoes of many MerchantSpring customers, there might be managing 50 grands North America, Europe. How do I, I'm looking at my 50 customers, how do I go through which one's should I maybe even have a conversation with? What goes through your mind as you would go through a list like that?
Brian Johnson
Yeah, I mean low hanging fruit. The ones that have the first conversation with are those that are doing are doing more sales than the rest of them, your top 10%. Those are the ones that I would talk to you in the first place mainly because they're probably doing some kind of Advertising.
First of all, they're probably doing some kind of advertising off Amazon already. You just don't know about it. Maybe they're even already working with Amazon for the demand side platform because Amazon does offer that kind of Management Service. But Amazon's own teams handle it much differently than an agency should handle DSP. There was certainly not the way that we would do it. So, take a brand for instance, that is selling. I mentioned 100 thousand dollars, the reason I say 100,000 dollars in sales because usually it is its combination of they have enough budget where they can do some speculative investing into Ad testing.
Now, I don't recommend starting out with Amazon DSP. I recommend getting to the point where you know which keyword targeting, which product targeting and which products that you sell, what combination of those three are doing well and then carry that over to DSP based of what you've learned. Because in your Seller Central in your brand dashboard, you're going to have not only across the entire brand, you're going to have some demographic information that Amazon provides inside of your brand dashboard inside of brand analytics.
You can also narrow that down to each individual product. So, usually in order for that, to be statistically significant or more accurate, to be able to target and to stand out enough for you to really say, you know what, predominantly, women by this particular product, you know, that's good to know. We can go heavier or we can spend a higher Ad budget on any platform including DSP.
Now that we have a hint that there's a more likelihood that we can narrow in who who are trying to target through DSP Advertising. Here's kind of where this comes into play. The last thing I will say is that, if they're at 100,000, they probably have enough revenue, and enough profitability already in order to fund active DSP testing, you really kind of need to do that similar to the way, you would start out with, you know, Tik Tok Ads, or YouTube Ads.
DSP is going to require a certain amount of budget. I would say at least 5,000 probably more likely at least 10,000 committing 10,000 dollars in budget and really wrap the head around and understand. Okay, how do we now shift our methodologies in our strategies and our thinking, from keyword targeting, which is pretty simplistic, right? It's like, okay, people are searching for this. Why don't I run an Ad on this particular search term? Okay, pretty simple. Product Targeting, Okay, I've got a direct competitor and that's their product and they're out of stock now or they're getting beat up on the reviews or I've got a better price or I've got a better product, I've got a better mousetrap than they have. I can run Ads against them. But now you're starting to shift into things that are a little bit more vague, if you will.
Another words, if you have a strong indicator in your brand analytics that says, hey predominately male, predominantly in the age of 55 to 60, these kinds of things where there's some kind of outlier that says, like know what most people, this this product seems to be pretty narrowly targeted to this particular profile or persona, and you can go after some of the demographics. Now brand analytics is very, very limited as far as what it tells you, compared to what you can advertise against inside of DSP.
One of the challenges, one of the things I had to get past and when I did, I fully committed to it is, I had always made the mistake as an entrepreneur of thinking that creating a persona for my target audience and painting this picture of like, oh, this person's name is Bob and they've got a wife and two dogs and they live in this city. And they've got this kind of car, this kind of stuff, I thought of those completely fluff. Now, don't get me wrong, I still do, but I thought that was very academic. I thought it's like, oh, that's kind of cool for marketing school for a master's degree in marketing. But let's talk about real life here, right? I don't want to do that much work, guess what? You didn't have to in previous years on Amazon, or any e-commerce platform, but as the competition Rises, that is, when you start seeing where you've got to get a better handle on who your target audience is.
The nice thing about this is that you can push them pressure back on your client in order to do this work. Now they can certainly hire you to do this kind of Investigation, really identifying who your target audience is, but they probably know their target audience based off the product that they brought to market better than you do. And really, they should be doing this. And if they're not willing to do this, that's kind of a red flag or an indicator to yourself. Is that they're only willing to do so much. Yeah, you definitely. If you're working with a wholesaler, you're much less likely will ever get that.
Paul Sonneveld
I just want to quickly get on to the budget expectation because I'm hearing some really large sums being than around. In fact, I heard someone say last week. You know, minimum spend is 35,000 dollars on the speed if you go through an agency. It's sort of like less than Amazon. How does it work?
Brian Johnson
Yeah, so Amazon, there's two different ways. So you have Amazon manage and you've got self-serve. Self-serve is very limited as far as like who can actually get access to it. Usually it's the larger agencies or agencies who have pulled in a favor and order to get access to the self-serve version of Demand-Side Platform. They're starting to open it up more and so it's getting more flexible. But Amazon has their own teams that will manage your demand side or their your DSP Advertising for you. However, there's a couple problems with the way they do it. One is and this is going to be a no surprise to people is there in it for themselves because what they're trying to do is they're trying to say, okay.
We're going to get you all this visibility. We're going to get so much brand exposure for you if you translate that what that means is, Impressions. They're going to show your ad everywhere. And we need you to be able to spend thirty five thousand a month. I think last or a couple years ago, they put it on sale for like 25 Grand a month but primarily what they're doing is they're accountable and they will tell you all day long.
It's like, hey, how cool, how great did we do? We got you in front of six million potential new customers. You're like, cool. How many you sold? And they’re like isn’t awesome? You got six million new eyeballs on your brand? But how much do we profit? It's like 6 million new people, huh? right? You're like, okay, I'm talking to a wall here. They're clearly spending your money in order to just blanket, just to shotgun out these DSP Ads, you really don't want to do that and that can get extremely costly. One of the reasons why Amazon I believe has I think it's like a three-month contract. I don't know if they still have that currently this year, but they certainly have in the past now.
Agencies, like, canopy for instance, we certainly do this for our clients. There's a couple different tiers of agency account on self-serve but primarily as an agency because agencies, which were generally trying to increase sales, increase market share, increase profitability, those are our big three mantra, you know, key metrics that we're going after for our clients.
Our interests align more with the clients interest because ultimately, they'll fire us because we're that, maybe we're on a month-to-month, we're not on a three-month tour, a one-year contract and so they'll fire us. And we also have the flexibility of coming in as little as I think is like five thousand per month in Ad spend, I would recommend starting at least 10,000. Some say, you know, do 40,000, but I think that's more for Enterprise level. I would say expected to spend 10,000, you might be able to get away of 5,000 a month. But you're kind of short changing your ability to really test out your potential target audience and really dial in, and optimize your Ads. So that then you get a return, a positive return on your ad, spend that outpaces what you're doing through native PPC on Amazon.
And so you can still do, they don't call it campaign they call orders on DSP, but they call it a campaign. So since most people are familiar with Seller Central's terminology. A campaign, you still want to probably do the standard thing of like, say, $20 per day, as far as a cap, right? There's a whole bunch of other controls like ten times as many controls is what you have inside Seller Central, a lot more granularity.
But that also means you've got to be working. You've got to dial this stuff in and so it is going to be more work, but it is definitely worth doing. When you've got a client that really wants to expand. There are certain kinds of products that work better than others and I'll touch on that here in a second. But the way that we do it with DSP is we try to figure out, okay, what kind of audience is.
Let's say for instance, we've got well, there's a propensity that like 60% mail and propensity that there's men in the range of 40 to 65. You know, that seems like a pretty broad range. But what you can do is you can segment this out into smaller slices. It's similar to what some do from a practice. It's an arguably, good or bad practice as far as having solo campaigns, where you have a single keyword in a campaign inside of a sponsor product Ad and you run a hundred different campaigns on one, you know? And so you've got control of every single one of those.
Well, that philosophy actually works pretty well in DSP where you take smaller slices and you control each one of those. And then you dial in which of those slices are outperforming the rest of them and 80/20, you get rid of the ones that don't just like standard optimization of advertising. You get rid of the slices that don't work, the smaller, more narrow target audiences and you double down triple down on the ones that are working well for you.
That's that is a best practice inside of DSP. You don't simply just go shotgun like Amazon would do for you. You slice it up and you manage those like you would, where the Ad is not showing quite as often to the same person or maybe you're setting a difference. Essentially, you're asking for a lower cost for every thousand Impressions or you set up different types of targeting goals in DSP. I highly recommend that the people go through, I mean, what you'd mentioned already is a great place to start, there's a lot of there's plenty of videos of other agency owners who have said like, hey here's how DSP works you've got Amazon's own training which has gotten a lot better than it was a few years ago to go through and get you, maybe not certified but at least certainly get into granular as far as what you can do. And then ultimately find a client that is willing to work with you to kind of be the training ground for that. That is usually part of the risk is getting that first couple of clients to say you've never done this before but I'm willing to let you do with my money.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. You willing to work with me?
Brian Johnson
Yeah, but ultimately what you've got to do is you got to come in and say look, You're already selling the X amount, 50,000, 100,000 a million dollars a month on Amazon. We had a client that did since Prime day. We had client did a million dollars yesterday in sales and I don't say that not to brag, but I don't know why everybody says that it's like, yeah, kind of bragging, right? Oh yeah, I'm cool. No, but I'm saying on that isn't like it's cool to see those kind of numbers. But it's because all of this, because I happen to know, all the work that came in in order to bring it to this point. It didn't just like on. Oh we just turned on some Ads and magic and it works and it was all profitable. No. It was a lot of work and it took time to learn it.
But if you're not willing to go through some pain, I can guarantee you like my first year of our agency was brutal. I can't tell you how many times I lost my voice from yelling and you know how much stress I took on the first year but you got to get through that first year to get your new processes down in on paper, you know, and get them bulletproof. But it is it is definitely worth it for those clients especially if let me give you a couple examples of products that work here, anything that's you want to take a look at products that are typically I would say at least 20, $25 price point, right? You don't want to have to lower price point because you've got to absorb some of that Ad costs initially right now.
I would also go for anything that has a longer lifetime value, like replenishable items, subscribe and save, kind of items. Those kind of things, right? Or anything that has any kind of a future upsell, or cross-sell opportunity for you. The longer lifetime value allows you to spend more initially also. Most of the costs and the risk is going to be on the front end, but it is definitely worth doing. I would also look at it from the standpoint of focus in on redoing the limited retargeting Ads for Shoppers.
This is just one example of an Ad type where you can run Ads that are remarketing or retargeting off Amazon, to those Shoppers, who didn't make it purchase yet. Whether that is your competitor or at your own, start out with just retargeting those who are your own.
The cool thing about this is another best practice that we use here is we’ll stack different DSPs so in other words, we'll run some general Ads that are designed in order to bring brand awareness to our target audiences, the slices of target audiences that we know by the kind of products that we're selling. And so, we'll run ads that are just kind of like, saying hey, you got to check out our brand or check out our product catalog and just kind of get some new to brand traffic to your site to. I mean, you could primarily we're sending that back to Amazon.
You can also send it over to a Shopify site or to your own website if you want to. But generally, we're trying to increase the consideration of the products we have. So, most of the time we're sending it back to Amazon even though it makes it, has that flexibility. So, you're stacking these different types of Ads where you're simply, you're making people aware of your brand similar to the way the billboards on highways do. It may not end up in a conversion today, but how many of you have, you go down your highway and there's some commercial truck, accident lawyer, and they've got 19 Billboards on your commute to work.
Paul Sonneveld
I was going to say, it was the Voyles.
Brian Johnson
Yeah, after while you remember you know the lawyers phone number because they make it, simple are used here at all the time. That is example of brand awareness advertising so that so that your brand and your product or your service is the first thing they think of when that event occurs. So they're planting seeds that whole time. That's what the brand awareness type of ad is designed to do.
And so then you run that, maybe keep that at a local little low Ad spend and then you stack back on remarketing or retargeting when Shoppers actually look at your product detail page, your competitors product detail, then you maybe run three to five ads that follow them around. So we're kind of remind them, hey, you didn't check out, come back and, check this out and you should dial those in.
So you stack those on each on top of each other and that is a great way. And in order to not only, not only bring your own traffic to Amazon rather than relying on native PPC Advertising which is gotten very expensive this past year. You've got a lot more control over who you're bringing in because you're actually focused in on who is the target audience that buys my product and how do I reach them?
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, well you've got so much riding and one hand, I feel like we've covered a lot today. On the other hand, we feel like we haven't really got into it. Which is it's time to feel like an iceberg, right? But it's a great, certainly being a great context setting you know, and talk about the potential and how to use it. I know you and I mentioned it at the just before we went on, I think I'd love to invite you back on the show actually to do a much more, I guess, practical skills, training type session. For those agencies that have really started to get their feet wet with these.
Today has been just a really fantastic and it's really helped me. Thank you. Really good picture. So we're about to wrap up but I do want to have one last question for you which is we talked a lot about like successful strategies that you started to touch on that. But let's talk about mistakes, I want to hear from you I don't you know you can use a personal example even better but also what you see out there in the marketplace what do you think is maybe the number one or number two mistakes that you see people make when it comes to DSP things things to avoid?
Brian Johnson
Yeah. So I mean there's a couple different Ad types I think that we just kind of learn from overtime and we learned because of our mistakes, we learn which ones work better and which ones don't. And that is, you can set things as far as like your retargeting window. In other words, you can say, I want it to run ads, only to those Shoppers who did not make a purchase in the last 14 days let's say. And so we used to say it's like, well, I'm going to run it for 90 days. And then what you find is that those all fail because they've been running too long and people just forgot that they were even shopping for after three weeks and so then those just spend a whole lot of money and then you realize like oh we shouldn't have let it run that long
However, on the flip side of that is let's say for instance that you have a product and a shopper, actually purchased your product and they click through on the Ad, they originally purchased your product. You can actually go back and you can retarget them. Let's say, 60 days, 90 days later, and say hey you know what? It's time to order another one. Maybe it's just a supplement they need to repurchase. Maybe you've upgraded your product and so you know widget number two you know that type of thing.
And so we used to run Ads mistakenly where we would simply just blanket everything and all everything runs for 90 days and what we really had to learn from that is like, no, no. This type of add only runs for seven to fourteen days. This kind of Ads runs 60 to 90 days. Those are our sweet spots similar to the way that we're slicing up audiences, demographics, lifestyle, the interest, the events that the channel they’re on. Maybe it's Amazon twitch and it's, like gamers and that kind of stuff.
The same way that we’ve learned instead of just doing kind of lazy broadcast, type of Ads that was a mistake because that can get really expensive when you're just kind of broadcasting is to slice it up. That's what we learn slice up, so that you're targeting is much more narrow, but you've got a lot more of those. And the same thing goes with how you set each of the Ads more so than you would have on likes, a Seller Central native PPC Ads.
There's a lot more individual settings that you can dial in and if you take the time, if you don't be lazy and you take the time to split test, the different settings, and to narrow things down narrow, as far as like, okay, I'm going to test a seven-day window and I’m going to test a 14 day window when it's 30-day window and it says a 60 day went, you know, instead of just saying like just shoot it y'all just keep running it and keep running it for the next three months. It's like No! You learn from those mistakes and of course, that is all money.
And I guarantee you is that when you spend a clients money and it grows, grows and grows, you definitely learn to sit down and bite your tongue. When you've got a client that says what the hell you guys doing? Like you guys have blown US money, it's like, but our return on Ad spend isn't what we were expecting it to be by now. And so you will have those times where you're going to learn but that's kind of where I'm making my suggestions to you. In order to avoid some of the pain that we went through is get more narrow in each of the campaigns that you do. The same thing frankly can apply over to Seller Central but certainly in DSP, you want to slice it up more from the get go. That way, you can control it a lot faster and you can identify the smaller segments of what's outperforming the rest of them. Instead of simply just saying like, overall, it's either performing or it's not performing and it's kind of meh kind of results. You can actually continue to dial in a lot faster. It's alot more work to set up. But trust me a lot more work to set up on the front end as a lot better than having a client yell at you for spending all their money. Yeah. Guarantees.
Paul Sonneveld
Absolute says, yeah. Spend it like it's your own be diligent.
Brian Johnson
Exactly.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, drive results do it slowly and clients will thank you for, that's great. Well look, I am looking at the clock. We're about to hit the 45-minute mark here, Brian. So we are certainly out of time, so I'm going to have to wrap it up there. Brian, first of all, I would just want to thank you for coming on the show today and being super generous with your sharing of expertise, tips, tricks, what’s works, the mistakes. You've learned the hard way too. I really appreciate it.
Brian Johnson
My pleasure.
Paul Sonneveld
I always ask at the end of the show, for any of our viewers or even other agencies that are interested in maybe working with you or exploring your services. What is the best way to get in touch with you?
Brian Johnson
You know, I'm on a bunch of different social media. Frankly, I will I do look at my email and so if you just want to email me a brian@canopymanagement.com. I'll reply.
Paul Sonneveld
I can vouch for that.
Brian Johnson
Yeah, I'm here.
(Both laughs)
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, excellent. All right. Thank you so much, Brian. That's it for today's episode of Marketplace Masters. Thank you very much for listening and don't forget to visit MerchantSpring to access. Exclusive offers only available to viewers of the show till next time.
