Ready to unlock the power of Amazon Ads? Join us for a fascinating deep dive into the world of Amazon advertising with our special guest, Stefan Bures, founder and CEO of metoda. Stefan is here to share his wealth of knowledge on Amazon Ads, offering a unique lens into its history, strengths, and how his company metoda is helping equip the retail industry to compete with Amazon. Expect to be enlightened on DSP linkout campaigns, product segmentation, and the concept of retail readiness.
We throw light on the unique selling propositions of Amazon Ads, its search ad, and demand-side platform (DSP). Stefan also shares insights into how Amazon Ads have impacted customer satisfaction and how it has contributed to Amazon's growth. We crack open the discussion on the differences between Google and Amazon Ads, providing a fresh perspective on the potential of DSP linkout campaigns as an audience targeting and customer acquisition channel.
Our conversation doesn't end there, as we also explore the significance of setting apt budgets for Amazon Ads on peak days and how heat mapping past seasonal events can help. Stefan and Mike also touch upon the future of digital marketing, taking into account the power of DSP linkouts, the rise of social selling, and the influence of Amazon, Google, and social media channels. We wrap up by talking about the importance of online presence and networking, and how it can pave the way for more opportunities. Don't miss out on this enlightening episode with Stefan Bures. We promise you'll walk away with a new level of understanding for Amazon Ads like never before.
Ready to unlock the power of Amazon Ads? Join us for a fascinating deep dive into the world of Amazon advertising with our special guest, Stefan Bures, founder and CEO of metoda. Stefan is here to share his wealth of knowledge on Amazon Ads, offering a unique lens into its history, strengths, and how his company metoda is helping equip the retail industry to compete with Amazon. Expect to be enlightened on DSP linkout campaigns, product segmentation, and the concept of retail readiness.
We throw light on the unique selling propositions of Amazon Ads, its search ad, and demand-side platform (DSP). Stefan also shares insights into how Amazon Ads have impacted customer satisfaction and how it has contributed to Amazon's growth. We crack open the discussion on the differences between Google and Amazon Ads, providing a fresh perspective on the potential of DSP linkout campaigns as an audience targeting and customer acquisition channel.
Our conversation doesn't end there, as we also explore the significance of setting apt budgets for Amazon Ads on peak days and how heat mapping past seasonal events can help. Stefan and Mike also touch upon the future of digital marketing, taking into account the power of DSP linkouts, the rise of social selling, and the influence of Amazon, Google, and social media channels. We wrap up by talking about the importance of online presence and networking, and how it can pave the way for more opportunities. Don't miss out on this enlightening episode with Stefan Bures. We promise you'll walk away with a new level of understanding for Amazon Ads like never before.
Welcome to Growing Ecommerce. I'm your host, mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce, also known as SMEC. Today, I'm joined by Stefan Bueres, founder and CEO of Netota. That's a company providing data, products and services for Amazon advertising. We talk about the history of Amazon ads in terms of what's on offer and how performance is developed. He introduces us to DSP linkout campaigns. These use Amazon audiences to drive traffic to your website. I really love that. We talk about retail readiness and product segmentation and some patterns that Stefan has identified on both the consumer side and the advertiser side, before and during key promotional dates. That could be the prime day events or holidays like Black Friday. It's really a very full agenda. Let's get into it, stefan. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks a lot, too, absolutely. Would you get us started with a quick introduction? What are your skills? What themes interest you?
Speaker 2:Yes, of course, my name is Stefan. I'm one of the founders of Netota. I do this now for more than 11 years. Asking about my skills is a really complex question. I would say I would classify myself as a nerd, not maybe a tech nerd, but more on the business or data side. I really love data. I really love e-commerce. I have another passion that's probably also more the topic of today, and this is a performance market.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I consider myself a nerd too. You're a good company.
Speaker 2:I would agree, Mike. Thanks Working with you on the last webinar.
Speaker 1:I'll take it as a compliment. Absolutely, geeks are in, but I'm not a geek, I'm a nerd. That's the real deal. You just mentioned Netota. I've been working on this company for 11 years. That's incredible. Maybe you could tell us a bit about that, because now you're an Amazon specialist. I don't know. Was Amazon always your main thing or did it have roots in a different space? Can you tell us a bit about that?
Speaker 2:We actually didn't start with Amazon at all. When we started the company, we saw that Amazon is winning the European markets pretty quickly. They started in this more or less EU5 context and Germany was a very big and important market many, many years ago. We saw that they have quite unique strength because they use data in a very good way. From the very beginning on, they used their price intelligence, their price automation and lots of algorithms to basically stay ahead of the competition.
Speaker 2:I remember back then lots of the old classical retails in the German markets. They had no price automation in place, nothing like that at all in mind. They simply set prices I don't know when In the beginning of the, when they listed the products and basically then the prices stayed the same over a very long time, which is still true for some brick and mortar businesses. I would say we saw this and we simply started with a very idealistic mindset. We wanted to help the retail industry to become competitive with Amazon. We wanted to fuel retailers with data for price intelligence, for price automation. We wanted to also add more data or provide more data to retailers, like for sourcing purposes, because we saw that Amazon is heavily using data for botting the right products and for also doing basically the initial price setup for also calculating stock amounts that they should basically order. We simply wanted to support the retail industry and did it with the start.
Speaker 1:Thanks for that introduction and I think that's a really important mission, because I have mixed feelings about Amazon and it takes this kind of cross border e-commerce thing to quite an extreme.
Speaker 1:Particularly, it's imported a lot of sellers from all over the world. I think there's definitely something to be said for helping enable local players against a huge presence like that. The topic of pricing is interesting too, as you mentioned, in offline retail. That's the history of how Amazon was started to differentiate, because in offline space you have real shelves and you actually have to change the price labels like on-the-shelves and stuff like that. You're constrained by space and physics and Amazon really imagined a digital shelf and dynamic repricing is one of those things. That now there are electronic labels in stores and some stores and stuff like that, but still many not. But yeah, amazon really just saw the possibilities when you remove constraints in a digital environment. Now, amazon has involved a lot over the years in your company as well, I guess. What would you say has been the biggest moves or changes to Amazon over the past years and how have you adapted to that?
Speaker 2:I think the biggest real evolution on Amazon's side is that they evolved from being now basically being the biggest and largest retailer in the Western world or online retailer to also become one of the most important ad platforms. We saw that in 2017 and that was more or less also the start where we decided to focus to work also with Amazon, because back then I remember so I told you in the beginning that my background, that one of the favorite topics that I have, is performance marketing. I also worked in performance marketing area before I started Metoder and I saw the potential that Amazon was having when they also become an ad platform. First of all, there's the search ads. That's quite interesting. I'm not sure if they started with, but I'm not sure if they started with the search ads or had DSP in parallel in place already, but in 2017, there was quite an interesting time because we saw Amazon would start, would really massively grow in the search ad area. We decided to support that with a professional intelligence you would call today.
Speaker 2:So we go automation for Amazon for sponsored ads, because out of my experience and out of the past working in Google Ads, for example on Google Ads topics, I saw that managing campaigns is really hard work, taking lots of time, and we felt that Amazon, or the e-commerce in general, is actually the perfect spot to fully automate advertising here, because you have all the data at hand, so you have the conversion data at hand, you see competitor data if we are also scraping lots of data, so we know who is potentially bidding on a keyword, who is appearing organically on a keyword, and back then we simply went out and said we can build a perfect tool that is taking all this context, information and data and then fully automating the process of Amazon advertising. That is how we started with it. Back to the question. I feel that the biggest change in Amazon's, let's say, past 10 years of evolution was really focusing on becoming a real ad platform as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I am not an Amazon expert, but just as an observer. I think that tracks and one of the reasons I brought you on this podcast. I have got a background in automating Google ads, so kind of parallel trajectory in some ways, but I don't want this podcast to become like a Google ads podcast or something like that. So thanks for coming on and giving us a chance to talk about Amazon ads a bit. I guess I think something that is so unique about that and you were describing it is like it is in some ways this more open environment.
Speaker 1:There is this vast amount of data that, compared to Google or Meta, which are quite closed environments, you can kind of size the whole category or size a market based on Amazon data. There is a really impressive amount of data that is accessible or available. So I think that something is really cool about it. But let's dig into it a bit. How is the platform developing? You mentioned search ads and you mentioned DSP. What is their offering shape like and what are their unique selling propositions for this ad platform?
Speaker 2:I think what makes them unique is I mean, that is very logical, I think. So Amazon is so deeply understanding the consumers and the consumer side and the whole customer journey basically, that I feel they are really superior when it comes to all these consumer data in the end, and they more and more make this simply accessible to advertisers. And I mean the start with basically Amazon ads or Amazon advertising as it was called back then was making their search available to advertisers in the end. So the Amazon search it's very similar to how Google, by the way, developed because they also started with their search and started to give this to advertisers to improve their visibility there. And I think this is also logical Because Amazon back then was frequently named as the top number one, I guess, product search in e-commerce, because people, even if they were Amazon customers or not, they simply started to search to look for products on Amazon because they found, and still find, all these reviews that they are very interested in before they're making a purchase decision, and so it was logical that they started with the search and this search is now also.
Speaker 2:I mean, they added more ad placements to the search and around the search, so I think they're pretty well set up there by now, and what is now happening is that they also make their audience data available to advertisers more and more, and this is what we feel a really interesting trend, because we spoke about the audience, so Amazon should know most about consumers if you compare it to all other platforms, and now they make this audience, this great audience knowledge, available to advertisers, and I feel this is the new big thing that we will talk about in the next years.
Speaker 1:And this is the DSP, yeah, the DSP. So yeah, definitely, and it's yeah, that's right. Product search is a big part of their advertising and their own proposition and we see that kind of wave of product search and advertising like kind of monetizing product search, still extending and expanding. There's, I think, going to be more and more retailers monetizing their onsite search in years ahead on the model of Amazon and sort of inspired by that model of the original Google AdWords back in the days. But there are these other kind of horizons ahead.
Speaker 1:I just kind of a sidebar, like I'm wondering how you find it, because, ironically, as a consumer I'm not that satisfied with Amazon search. Like I go in there and, for example, I'll search let's just say, I search for a bookshelf of certain dimensions or certain colors or something like that. Like there's not a lot of product filtering options in there. And it's at the point, there are so many ads in there which sometimes overrule the relevance. I mean, do you feel that that's advertising has has hurt the customer experience or how do you? How do you see something like that?
Speaker 2:I would agree.
Speaker 2:To some extent I think so, and I remember that while Amazon was adding over the past years more and more ad placements, this discussion was becoming louder and louder and different places, on events and different blogs and so on.
Speaker 2:But so I cannot really tell how this will in the end impact or affect the customer satisfaction of Amazon users. Let's call it like this. But what we see when you just very objectively take a look at their performance data so in terms of a business, how successful is Amazon as a retailer we cannot really see that this is hurting Amazon at all. So you can very transparently look into the investors report they are publishing and you can take a look at what are they generating a first party sales, what revenue and what is basically generated through the marketplace. And even if we see that first party sales with a bit stagnating at the moment, we see that the marketplace is more skyrocketing still or more definitely growing a lot. And if you take this as a measure of, maybe, customer satisfaction, I would say Amazon is doing pretty well. They are growing above average still, even if they are gigantic. But if you take this as a measure, I would say they're quite successful and so that's what I would answer, this, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think whenever you look at Amazon's growth figures, it's so important to just consider the baseline number that they're growing on top of, because it's absolutely insane. They're already so big. It's so hard to put up those growth numbers. Well, I mean. So we had a webinar together the other day and you shared a really interesting data point about the evolution of return on ad spend, which is for Amazon advertisers. They might be more familiar with the cost of sale, but this is just the inverse of that, but you showed how, on a quarterly basis, the return on ad spend has been developing since 2019. Could you describe that in words, since we don't have the chart in front of us? Can I tell our listeners what you saw and how you interpreted that?
Speaker 2:Okay. So what we take a look at is not our own data that we can also take a look at, because we also see diminishing returns in our own ad system but our focus in our ad platform is to really improve, basically, the way we reduce wasted ad spend. So we don't see the effects so heavily. But if you take a look at the Amazon investors report, then you will see that from 2019 to now, we see a decrease of round about 40% when you take a look at the returns of Amazon advertising or Amazon ads.
Speaker 2:And I mean it's logical in a sense that Amazon ads is growing way at a higher growth rates compared to the retail business of Amazon. Oath is still growing, but Amazon ads is growing way faster. It was also pushed high by, obviously, the Corona pandemic, but we see diminishing returns. I guess three, four years ago it was straightforward that you needed to use Amazon ads, sponsored ads, to scale your business on Amazon, but now I feel also talking to players like to brands and retailers in the market I feel that you have to think way more about your ad efficiency, which is also. I mean that happened with Google, we talked about that, and now it's happening with Amazon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we can draw comparisons there too to a platform like Meta, for example, or originally Facebook ads, where there was the term gets used a lot about that is arbitrage. That it was some kind of an arbitrage where people could just acquire traffic for disproportionately cheap. And then things change a lot in the Meta platform as privacy changes came after iOS 14 and stuff like that and generally people flooded into that platform and it's not quite as simple as it used to be. But we see it done a similar trend with Amazon where, yeah, you mentioned 40% decline over the last three years or so on three, four years and that's just to put it in absolute figures. That was from about a row of 10 to now kind of around six, which is not that different.
Speaker 1:I pulled Google ads row of state and found that it's around 5.5, let's say so. These channels have become much more comparable, where I think Amazon used to kind of look down a bit on the efficiency of a channel like Google. But if we think of that topic earlier, that the search engine result page inside of Amazon, it's getting. There's a lot of ads on there. It feels full, it feels like the ad inventory is pretty stacked up and then we see that returns might be diminishing. Maybe it does support that idea that the search part of Amazon is getting increasingly saturated, increasingly competitive. So from your standpoint, I know you're also really interested in Amazon DSP. We're talking about that as maybe what's next and I think that kind of data does support the case for DSP as being a relatively untapped opportunity, kind of the next opportunity Amazon ads. Could you talk to us about Amazon DSP?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. That's my favorite topic at the moment and I think there are good reasons for this, because the Amazon DSP is not easily accessible. It's only accessible through agency partners like us. But it is the hidden gem, I would say, if you think about Amazon ads. So we started working with the DSP I don't remember exactly, maybe in 2019.
Speaker 2:And back then the DSP was more something that advertisers used every now and then for specific, more, I would say, marketing projects, like I want to launch a new product and I'm adding DSP to it to get higher reach for the higher visibility for the product, because with the Amazon DSP, you are not only advertising on Amazon sites, you are also, basically it's a demand side platform you can, it's a programmatic approach so you can go anywhere to any side in the internet, basically with your ads. And so one typical project was I want to push and complete a new product and the second was I have a deal and I just want to bring more traffic to my deal on a high season in a high season time. So I think over the past years it started to change a bit. We see way more always on campaign setups now, so we definitely always recommend to start with Spongebob ads, because you can identify the products that work well, I have good conversion rates, that have a good retaradiness and so on and then you basically test this also with the DSP and move the let's say the initial project of testing a product, if that works out fine, to an always on setup. This is what we've seen over the past years and I think that the next big thing will be DSP link out campaigns, because Amazon they are struggling internally also.
Speaker 2:Are they a retailer or are they some kind of an ad platform? But over the past years it became pretty obvious that they focus on becoming a real ad platform and that means they are opening up in terms of KPIs and but also in terms of giving the audience the Amazon audiences to advertisers also for link out campaigns. And there's a great opportunity opening up at the moment because you can make use of Amazon audience inside or the Amazon audience attributes and you can use it for link out campaigns that bring the traffic to your store. So how we see it in the end is you should work with Amazon, because they are the gigantic player in the e-commerce, to secure your baseline sales and revenue, but you should also work on a maybe longer term roadmap to also sell directly to consumer through your own website or to your through our own store, and there the Amazon DSP linkout campaign topic is one of the hot things you should take a look at in the future.
Speaker 1:You know. Thanks for breaking that down for us. I think that's so interesting, that movement from these very like kind of campaign oriented or flight based spending on DSP. Who are these always on campaigns? It's something that I'm advocating for in Google programmatic as well, because there's still like a very much of flight based or campaign based approach there, and I think that there's just more of an opportunity there for personal always on activity there. But I'm not source of legacy stuff, maybe about how budgets are structured, and I'm glad to see, though, that that's kind of taking hold in the Amazon. And, yeah, these linkout campaigns, that's really cool. I mean, one thing we were talking about in the webinar the other day was, like you know, we had brainstormed a bit before that. We kind of came up with this sort of framework like a quadrant analysis where discussing, like, the traffic sources and then the conversion location. So maybe you can introduce that framework and like where DSP is situated there compared to, for example, or like the different DSP flavors that are out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really happy to do that, even if it was, I would say, our common brain power in the end. So what we simply did is we wanted to come up with a very easy framework on how to use, let's say, google and Amazon ads and combine it with the conversion location. So where do you convert your? Whether you win your customers or make the revenue in the end? So, and the conversion location might be either Amazon or it might be your own website or store, and basically the traffic source, as I said before, can be Amazon ads or Google ads, for example that you can add any other ad channel as well and the basic idea is you have Amazon as your baseline revenue driver and you have, on the other hand, your store to basically win the customer relationship over the long run, and so owning a customer relationship is very powerful if you think about a customer lifetime approach, and this is a very strategic setup that you should definitely. So you should definitely have both setups at hand. So your baseline revenue secured on Amazon and you should have your own store, your direct to consumer strategy in place as well, and we feel that there are four quadrants.
Speaker 2:So one gradient is you are basically on Amazon, so you're selling on Amazon and you're getting the traffic through sponsored ads. So through Amazon ads, sponsored ads, and so the search ads basically. And this is the one of the quadrants. Then you have another quadrant you're using Amazon ads, the DSP, but you're using it for link out purposes, with linked out campaigns, and you're directing the traffic to your website or to your store and there you're basically converting the traffic. And then you have two other quadrants. One is basically bringing traffic through an ad platform like Google to Amazon, so drive to Amazon. In the end, this is a quadrant that is well more left for the experts I would say I'm, because it's quite a complex setup and, mike, you can talk more about that. And there is the other quadrant that's left. It's bringing, using Google ads to bring traffic to your own website and store and convert it there.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think it's for explaining that and that's Amazon was always kind of this like distribution channel and generating kind of sales and orders, but I love this link out campaign for also then becoming an audience targeting and actually a customer acquisition channel, which I think is so exciting, and that was always. Google was always really clear about that that they want to send traffic to your web shop and that's why one of the reasons that they proved so popular and grew so fast and they tried to kind of also own the transaction. On the other hand, they tried the marketplace-like programs or they introduced a buy box or people could just check out right on Google it's called Buy on Google and they recently just they're winding that program down. I still this is not a popular opinion, no one agrees with me, but I still think we haven't seen the last event. I think that it's still too attractive and they'll try again in one form or another. I agree, yep, and I think I've probably said before on this podcast, but I think that they'll use their new generative search offering to maybe try to find a food hold there.
Speaker 1:But anyway, yeah, this drive to Amazon thing that you mentioned is quite complicated, where you can use Google Ads to drive traffic to your Amazon store and it's just so complicated because Amazon themselves are very dominant in the Google auctions and they advertise both on their own behalf as a retailer and they advertise on the behalf of sellers as well, and so it's just quite thorny because you end up potentially competing head to head with. I can only estimate this, but I see all the evidence to me points to Amazon as the symbol largest vendor on Google shopping. I cannot see a case that anyone else is spending more and you're potentially. You know, if they're advertising on your behalf, then there's like a cannibalism question that comes to mind. That's definitely a thorny area and anyway, yeah, I do like that framework of just traffic sourcing to where you location for understanding these panels or tactics.
Speaker 1:Well, I still got to you. I wanna touch on a couple more topics because earlier you mentioned that, like your, retail readiness is gonna be important in deciding what to advertise, so maybe we can come back to that. What is retail readiness? Why is it so important?
Speaker 2:Riddler. Readiness is, I guess, a term that is very basically related to selling on Amazon. I feel, yeah, even if I would say it's also. It's a general concept that is quite important in the whole, in the entire e-commerce industry. So in the end, it's about being ready for potential customers, consumers, to also make a purchase decision and decide to go with your product offering, and it means that there are some components of it. So one is we talked about that already before. So one is the price. So if you're a retailer, you need to have an attractive price. If you're a brand, there's also a competitor, peer group of products and you also need to be somehow competitive with your price offering.
Speaker 2:And at the same time, it's about basically lots of communication aspects. So it's about the content of a product. So this needs to be you need to talk about your product, you need to describe it properly, you need to have images and potentially also video in place. You might also want to talk about your brand, so explain why your product is superior compared to another one which is, feature-wise, almost the same, but you might distinguish yourself with your brand, mission, vision whatsoever. And there's another very important aspect, especially if we talk about Amazon, and that's the reviews and ratings. So you all know that all of the products on Amazon have typically reviews and ratings, and if you want to make a decision between one or the other, you might also read these ratings and make your decision based on what other people held about the product.
Speaker 1:And thanks for unpacking that for us. And speaking of buy on Google, there's sort of a Google equivalent here, because in the buy on Google program they were looking at similar factors and it could positively influence your chance of getting the buy box in the buy on Google program, which was commission-free. That was kind of their way to attack Amazon there, but it didn't work. People just didn't take the offer up anyway. But they're taking those same factors, similar to retail readiness, and now it's US only currently, but they've introduced something in the Merchant Center called a scorecard, which, again, it's motivating you to work on these things, because we, for example, should be Sis ж comparatively.
Speaker 1:You know, if we look at the customer experience of cool shopping, it's not great. Like, yeah, there's two elements. There's the shopping tab, which is perhaps a bit of a different story, although yeah, and then there's, and then there's a search engine result page where these, these product listing pop up, but it's, you know, with Amazon, you know what you're, what you're in for, you know you're expecting good prices. You're expecting, you know, informative product pages and all this kind of stuff. And and you've got this social proof that an informative consumer peer information and former reviews of rating and with Google, like that's a point of retail ready to this right and that's a big part of it is to support that customer experience and with Google, that's why they're also trying to, I think, now to incentivize that a bit so that they can improve their customer experience and compete a bit more with Amazon.
Speaker 1:Because, as you, as you mentioned earlier, amazon very dominant in product search, a lot of product searches starting there, and that hurts Google because ultimately there are I don't know trillions probably of searches running through Google, but they, they, they're okay, they make money on service related certain queries as well, any kind of commercial query they can make money on, but product searches are very important category for them. So now you've got you've got your retail readiness covered, like how can you get a little more advanced? Like, what's your view on product segmentation? This is something we kind of wanted to talk about on the web environment, but we didn't have time, so maybe you could explain to us your approach to product segmentation.
Speaker 2:To. We were running out of time there, and so what's the difference, maybe, between Amazon ads or running ads on Amazon and Google? So Google is using your feed, your product feed, so you can basically upload all of your products quite easily, and in Amazon, you have to create campaigns. Yes, there are ways of also adding lots of products to a campaign, but we would not really recommend it. So our setup is typically you have a campaign for a specific product and there are lots of good reasons behind, but don't just let's not discuss the details here. So in the end, it means that you have to think about what products do you want to really advertise? And there is a, there's a, I guess, an approach used by by Amazon itself, and they recommended this and lots of also Amazon ads. Customers are using it now and adapting to it, and this is a BCG framework in the end, which is taking a look at how, basically, what is the product lifecycle at the moment and how, how, how many conversions do you generate with the product? So you're ending up at the typical four dimensional or no, not actually sorry, two dimensional, but four quadrant BCG metrics and you then simply decide on is it a new product? Is it an old product? Is this more, maybe, in the cash cow section? Is it more in the staff section? Or, if it's a completely new product without any conversions, do you want to test it out as a question mark in the end? And we like that approach because you can quite easily segment your product catalog into these four quadrants in the end and then make decisions for your advertising campaign setup. So, for example, let's talk about just just one quadrant and this is the question mark quadrant.
Speaker 2:So you have, for example, a new products, you've currently launched some set of products and obviously there are pretty low conversions happening at the moment, and then you basically want to know is this a real star or is this in the end, more, more a poor dog product? And you can use Amazon ads to very quickly learn how scalable this product is. So you will start investing some, some, some ads into these, these, these products. You quickly get a return or see how is basically the conversion rate behaving. And after you've done the basic right, the basic campaign optimization, you will pretty quickly see in what Cradrant is. Can you bring the products to? So, is it really a star? And you can now try to make it a cash cow in the future, or is it more a poor dog and you simply stop advertising, just sell it off? And that's how we use a product segmentation at Metola.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks, there are similar kind of adaptations of the BCG matrix that we see around in Google ads and I don't know we are talk. That's our second quadrant analysis of the episode, so we'll probably leave it there for our listeners. Yeah, but I mean I guess a little little mini call to action. I just you know these are. I love quadrant analysis. You can really quickly, you can apply these type of analyses to so many topics, I don't know, and I just also encourage people to think of like a Z dimension, you know, not just on this X and Y axis, but also as multi-dimensional as possible without over-engineering things.
Speaker 1:But let's see, While I've still got you, we've got a bit more time and we'll relieve our poor listeners of any more quadrant analysis. So that's on the forbidden list, not allowed to mention anymore. Resty, how can I find it's not just kidding. Yeah, you know we were talking a bit about key dates, like also peak season in Q4, but also other key dates like prime date in this webinar, and you were discussing three patterns that you received, that you see in regards to bid and budget on these, on these key promotional dates. So maybe you could unpack those first.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2:So what we do, as we're quite as we're really collecting lots of data on these key dates we also run types of analysis where we monitor a huge set of keywords on an hourly basis and just take a look at what products and brands are visible at what I am throughout the day, and what we see as typical patterns is either in the low you have a low budget at hand, but you set wrong bits and too high bits, obviously and the typical pattern is that you are active early in the morning, visible early in the morning with your ads, and then your visibility is simply decreasing throughout the day, which is which is straightforward there.
Speaker 2:So you're running simply out of budget. And this is the first pattern. The second pattern that we see is you have a very high budget, so basically you can almost not spend it throughout the day, so you will see an increase in visibility throughout the day and then it will go down, basically with the, with the declining traffic at some point in the day. And there's the third pattern which is really important to know about is you have a low budget, but you had the right bit accordingly, and this is a pattern I mean if, if you have a low budget, you should try to really find a good bit or the right bit, the best bit that you can set, especially on deal days, and then you will, in the beginning of the day, not be very visible, but your visibility will increase throughout the day and potentially also increase into the evening times, which is which is the most efficient setup if you have low budgets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we see. See similar things on dates like Black Friday, although at this point the bidding question in Google has mostly been overtaken by Google. They're moving. You know, large majority of advertisers are using just fully automated bidding from Google, so it's a bit of a different topic, but it's just so important to just be aware and be on it and because, and you know, you can easily look at your historical data and just kind of, you know, report that hourly for past seasonal events and just heat map that to make it more visible and you will see where the traffic was, where conversion rates were like like when is the day really hot? And you're just going to make sure that you're able to be present there I've got. Yeah, let's see.
Speaker 1:We've got time for one, two more maybe so I know you've got a hard stop at the hour. One more really great insight you shared. You've seen among many. You've seen a lot of great insights. You'd see the interesting ships in branded and generic search around these peak dates. So can you explain that to us?
Speaker 2:Yes, I think that's also a very logical behavior of consumers. So around peak days, what we see is people on peak times look for more for search, more for brand names, versus compared to organic terms. And I think that's quite logical because around peak times there's high discounts, there's all these, these, these deals, and people simply look for bargains in the market. So the search behavior simply changes. We also see that people more tend to look for higher price products in these days and, yeah, I think that also makes sense. So for brands, that in the end means so this may be two, two takeaways out of this. So, first of all, for brands, they should really take care that they are visible on their branded terms, and for competitors, it means they could think about using the brand that's traffic from another, from their competition, to leverage their own traffic.
Speaker 1:Good tips, and, yeah, I think that's a really interesting point about people kind of shopping upwards or shopping buying higher ticket items. I mean, I guess you know you're looking for these discounts and that promotional period will kind of increase your purchasing power, and we also saw that born out with data around the average order value. The average order values are going up on Black Friday compared to, as an example, compared to every other Friday. But got time for one more, I think. So I want to ask you to close it out, alice, a bit about what's next. What do you see coming up in digital marketing, or which trends are you watching or anything that you feel is overhyped right now? That's a great question to conclude this session.
Speaker 2:Okay. So I talked about that really a lot today. So I think one of the really trends to watch is DSP Linkout. I feel most of businesses out there don't even know that this is possible. So using the Amazon audience to bring to own, in the end, the company in your own store or website what is overhyped. I think there's another quite interesting topic we touched on that very shortly in the webinar and this is basically social selling.
Speaker 2:So I would potentially agree to what you said yesterday, that social selling in the sense that this, that the company is not going to be able to do that, that social selling in the sense that the conversion location is in the social channel, is maybe a bit overhyped. I'm not really sure if that's doable. So we see Google struggling with being the conversion location, and if Google struggles, I think that's really smart people behind. Then I doubt that the social media channels will have an easier time to do so, but what I feel is so there's definitely a third. So let's say we have Google they are asked a real big search channel. Then we have Amazon as the big retail channel, which is now also offering ads, and I think social media in general is quite interesting to influence the marketing will be quite interesting topic also in the future, and this is a mix of at least these three channels that consumer brands should have on their radar for the future.
Speaker 1:Thanks for walking us through those. And yeah, I totally agree with you said about DSP. Just this link option having that power of Amazon audiences and bringing the traffic to your website. It just seems super attractive, so pretty that not enough people know about it and hopefully more do. Now, Before I let you go any shout outs or anything like that, I'm looking forward to the next session we have together.
Speaker 2:Mike, it was really a blast, the webinar yesterday and also this talk today. I'm looking forward maybe to have a have a catch up and and half a year, a year, and see how all of our ideas have now materialized.
Speaker 1:Cool, We'll have to put that in the calendars. And Stefan, where can we find you online? Obviously at LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:So me personally and the other touch point is metodacom. Just reach out to us Happy to discuss friends topics or simply work together with any of you. Awesome Well, thanks again. So much for your time.
Speaker 1:Stefan, thanks for joining us. Thank you to Mike With pleasure. Likewise, thanks for listening to Growing Ecommerce, and if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider sharing it with coworkers, friends or within your professional network. We really appreciate it. This podcast is produced by a smarter e-commerce, also known as Mech. To learn more, visit smarter-e-commercecom.