Amazon Sponsored Ads: strategies and tactics for budgets & spend pacing ⎜ AMZ Pathfinder ⎜ EP 153

Ryan Cramer: What's up, everyone? Welcome to my corner of the internet. I'm your host, Ryan Cramer and this is Crossover Commerce, presented by PingPong Payments, the leading global payments provider helping sellers keep more of their hard earned money. Hey, what's up everyone, Ryan Cramer with Crossover Commerce. Thanks for joining us for another live episode of this beautiful podcast that, in my corner of the internet, I like to bring the best and brightest experts in the Amazon and eCommerce space. That being said, today's episode, as always, is presented by PingPong Payments. No, we're not a table tennis company. We are a cross- border payment solution helping you save more time, money, and effort when it comes to selling your brand online. That could be in Amazon Marketplace. It could be multiple marketplace like Rakuten. Wish you could be selling and see discount, all these different things worldwide and marketplaces worldwide. As your brand grows, make PingPong a growth partner with you. It's free to sign up. Go ahead and check out the link in the show notes below or you can obviously check out PingPong online on their website. Just go ahead and click in the comments or the show notes below if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast episode when we release this in audio format, but this is video and we appreciate you tuning in live. If you have questions, comments, smart aleck remarks, whatever that might be about our topic today, feel free to go ahead and comment and we'll see those live and answer those questions, as seen fit but what we wanted to talk about today, this is the first week, believe it or not for all those I was talking with our guests before hopping on this and it was really fascinating, I had this sneaky suspicion that around this time every year, it almost feels like if you're an eCommerce, you have that arbitrary how many days until Christmas feeling. It's kind of like bubbling on the inside. I went and looked in of course, it was almost right on the money, the intuition feeling never went away, 101 days depending on where you're listening this from, 101 days until Christmas Day. That's not to scare anyone, it's just a number. But in fact, it almost encompasses what we're going to be talking about today and that is building and preparing for the Q4 rush on eCommerce. Everyone will note that there's lots of different pros and cons of what's going on right now in the logistics chain trying to get inventory but you have to prepare for maybe not just, I would say I would categorize those as the top things to worry about and to prep and plan for of course, without inventory, you can't sell anything but the secondary thing I would say or 1A, if you will, would be to build and plan your ad spend strategy online. It's more and more important as costs go up. It's important to have these tactics, your strategies and budgets for spin PC in play. That's what we're going to be talking about today. Of course, I want to bring back one of our friends of Crossover Commerce, friend of the show who is back on episode 89, I want to say of the show, so we had a couple of months and he's also fresh off of vacation. We're going to get his brain kick started, if you will, back from straight from vacation and here to talk about your planning strategy and what it takes to get these next 101 or so days. In line, we're going to be talking about strategies on Amazon. Of course, I'm talking about Brent Zahradnik of AMZ Pathfinder. Brent, welcome back to Crossover Commerce.

Brent Zahradnik: Hello. Hello. Nice to be back.

Ryan Cramer: crosstalk.

Brent Zahradnik: This is such a, oh, sorry. Yeah, Hello. Nice to be back. This is such a nice kind of fun welcome back from little holiday, like I mentioned to you earlier in our email exchange. I wish all the stuff I was set to do this week is this fun and entertaining, but there's probably a lot of emails sitting in an inbox somewhere for me that I have to deal with first.

Ryan Cramer: I was going to say don't open your laptops until tomorrow. This is the last day but I appreciate you hopping on and finding time, technically, still on vacation or your last day on vacation. First off, where do you go? Was it relaxing and enjoyable?

Brent Zahradnik: Well my father, I live here in France and my father was actually visiting for about two weeks. He's still here actually. He leaves in a couple days but the highlight of the trip was us going to the Pyrenees, like the mountains between Spain and France. We did a gravel cycling event there. We spent three days rounding up some like obscenely big mountains. Relaxing? No. Refreshing? Yes. Good time with my dad who I haven't seen much in the last two years, thanks to COVID? Yes. It definitely checked a lot of the boxes that I was looking for. Yeah, but relaxing, it wasn't. I think I'm still recovering physically.

Ryan Cramer: Well, the Pyrenees is famous for, obviously, Tour de France, which I, believe it or not, this is the first year I almost, I watch almost every single day. It was that enthralling and...

Brent Zahradnik: It's a really good crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: ...maybe it's a set... I was going to say, it's great race this year but it's always fascinating to see the landscape. I mean, like I say the landscape, the countryside, the mountains and everything, everything a beautiful country like France has, which I know you're lucky to have. Super involved in biking, I'm assuming, since that's what you guys decided to do, right?

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, yeah, this is, I mean, I grew up cycling. My dad worked for a bicycling magazine for many years. It's a big part of my life.

Ryan Cramer: Really?

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ryan Cramer: Bicycling magazine. I've never, that's a publication. I'm not a subscriber but that's really fascinating. You'd rather be on, I know, this is a little random, but will you be mountain biking or would you rather be road racing or road biking?

Brent Zahradnik: If I had to pick between those two, road for sure, but there's a new category cycling called like gravel riding, which is kind of between the two. That was what this event was. It was a lot of road but I had a really thick like knobby tires on my, what looks like a road bike. It's kind of like between the two, a lot of dirt, a lot of gravel, a lot of mud, but then we're on the road as well, and going at fairly high speeds, especially when descending down inaudible. It was intense.

Ryan Cramer: I was going to say, yeah, for the mountains that scares me just driving but on a bike, I can't imagine that it being but like the ups and downs, this is a nice transition. I'm going to try this, like the ups and downs of Pyrenees, so goes the ups and downs of Amazon sales. We don't want those values. We want those peaks and we want them to stay high, right? Q4, like I alluded to in our introduction, Q4 is a lot closer, but technically Christmas Day less than 100, 101 days away. That gets a lot of people in panic mode there. This is the countdown. We start pushing this out farther and farther every year. I think this year is going to be even more exacerbated in my mind. I think you're going to see people shopping earlier than ever, just because the supply chain is so backed up. You want to be able to get inventory and just goods in general at a quicker speed. Costs are going to continue to skyrocket. A lot of people are trying to inaudible.

Brent Zahradnik: Things like that...

Ryan Cramer: This is what-

Brent Zahradnik: ...crosstalk case, yeah, containers, especially. I mean, we hear this from all of our clients except those that source domestically whatever country they are selling. We have a couple American businesses that are made in America, a couple of in the UK that are made the UK, some of European, they're made in other parts of Europe. They're not contending with some of that. However, that's reality for many of our other clients. Yeah, we hear about that nonstop.

Ryan Cramer: Of course. With that being said, like I mentioned before, this is kind of the most important cornerstone, the keystone, if you will, of your business. You have to have that in place. I know lots of people are just waiting, I think the statistic is on average. Their inventory, geez, it's sitting on the water, once it even arrives, in poor... technically, it's sitting there for a week or two on average and that's about, on average, what it takes to get across the ocean, depending on again, where you're shipping and sourcing from. That being said, that's kind of the tricky part about planning and forecasting. We wanted to talk about taking that into account what really are the biggest things? Is there so much that we're going to have to really worry about this year in terms of our Q4 planning with that being in mind or is it kind of business as usual? Still strategies are in play. You have the more spend. You're going to be looking at different tactics to kind of stand out and bidding on those keywords. What are the major things that are kind of either giving you heartburn right now or things that our listeners need to really, truly focus on coming into the next 100 or so days?

Brent Zahradnik: Well, I mean, the first step that is a prerequisite for any campaign and we're going to set up a run or any of our clients are going to talk to us about setting up and running with the having insufficient inventory and having a good product with good reviews, right? Those things are the prerequisite. That kind of goes, without saying, almost but that has been an issue for a lot of our clients, even those that we consider to be very successful, long term businesses with steady sales especially in the last couple of years, especially last year, many clients and I've heard this from other agency owners, are down year over year in terms of revenue, but that's just kind of a given because I think last year's COVID explosion with eCommerce was totally unprecedented and no one had foreseen that in 2019. A lot of people were caught flat footed. All the businesses weren't ready for that. Some of them were benefited tremendously. A lot of businesses that we work with did a lot of expansion on the back of that and then they've had a walk some of that back because some of those products didn't work out as well as they thought or the demand wasn't as strong as it was during COVID times when things were really intense with eCommerce. I think a lot of people are returning to physical stores. I'm really curious to see what the breakdown is going to be this year with foot traffic, starting in those run ups to Christmas because like you said, Christmas is 101 days, but I kind of counter proposed to you, yeah, but if you're buying stuff 101 days from now, it's already too late. You want to be in crosstalk...

Ryan Cramer: That's right.

Brent Zahradnik: ...the two weeks before. You don't want to upset a girlfriend or boyfriend or kids or whatever, when it comes to that.

Ryan Cramer: Exactly. Well, for those last minute shoppers, yeah. Does this year triple digit warning and it's actually a lot shorter because the ads are even starting nowadays. I think it's super fascinating. Again, we're kind of alluding to the logistics and supply chain more so but they alluded to, I mean, I think it was an IBM or more like logistics and more like tech focused. It's one of those, " Hey, you see a trendy product. Kid wants it. You're trying literally forever in various different ways to buy it." You see, there is literally off the shelf in retail store. You're looking online. You're refreshing constantly. I know I was doing it in certain products last year but last year was a different really weird caveat. Like 2020 was this weird, inflated a lot but then kind of this year is kind of resettled. You saw but not as much growth. You saw it actually resettle down to traditional numbers. I see a lot of people who were almost like upset. They knew that it was inflated and then it came down obviously. Is that pretty consistent with your clientele?

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, isn't it funny?

Ryan Cramer: Is it expectations? Yeah.

Brent Zahradnik: Right. crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: These are real numbers.

Brent Zahradnik: This is a temporary condition and it's probably unlikely to repeat itself the same time next year. Your numbers for middle of September are not going to look the same as they were during that COVID period. Yet, still people are disappointed. Yeah, it's kind of funny because like they have their logical brain and then irrational side where it's like man, but still, I wish it was like it was last year. In some cases, on the advertising site, we can't get the same results we did last year because just demand is so much stronger. That's kind of one thing I can talk about a little bit with the budgeting because the amount you spend is entirely based on demand. You're not going to be able to get the clicks and spend the money if the demand isn't present. September and August are generally speaking like slower- ish months because things really start to heat up in quarter four, of course, depending on the product line and everything like that but I know for a lot of our clients, we found spend is lower in August and despite it being a long month, 31 days.

Ryan Cramer: With that being said, we're going in September, right now we're, this is live in September, midway through September, right now, strategies are what? You're planning for Q4 strategies, pacing, budgets are confirming. What are the must do right now for September going into the next two weeks, essentially, because Q4 starts in two weeks. What are those things that we're conditioning sellers for? What do we need to be doing to prep for Q4 right now?

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, that's a good question. I think the first thing would be to look at last year's data, right? What happened last year? Now, we just spent five minutes talking about how different COVID made everything. I think one trend that we have seen and I've confirmed this with other agency owners or people who work at aggregators, who have managed a lot of spend, is that CPCs actually are up year-over- year. I'm someone, who in the past, has really kind of, I'd say like pooh- pooh this idea because people are always like, " Amazon's getting more expensive. Amazon's going to be more expensive." I've been hearing that since 2016. That's actually had not been really true for many years because that was a feature of our function of the time of year and whatever product category that person was in and they'd say, " Oh, it's getting more expensive," but if you looked at the data and aggregate for a given category or set of clients, it actually wasn't. It was a roller coaster, right? It depended on time of year and maybe there was some months inaudible that were more costly but now we've consistently seen, I think it's like three quarters in a row, that Amazon is actually getting more expensive now, especially if we're talking about the main ad type that people think about when they think about Amazon PPC, which is sponsored products, which is what a lot of these new budget features I wanted to chat a little bit about are really for the for sponsored products. They don't exist yet for sponsored brands are sponsored display, which from my own anecdotal data we have from our client base, make up maybe 20% and 10% respectively of accounts spend depending on the accounts needs and the client's kind of interests and being found different places in the ecosystem. Still, that means that sponsored products is anywhere from 65 to 75% of spend in an account. It's still the majority is still the monster, right? That's why these PPCs are so important for that particular campaign type.

Ryan Cramer: Absolutely. Since we last talked obviously, there was a prime day and I saw some numbers like which outspends for just one, I mean, technically two days but two days was astronomical depending on the category type. Really it depends, obviously with the need, the volume, the supply and demand. Again, that's the economics 101. What's supply and demand? The more supply or the more demand, the more costly it's going to be. That being said, going into this year, has there been anything surprising in terms of like category wise or is there have been, is it all pretty much holding traditional in terms of, you're going to play out the inaudible for supplements in those high evolved categories but is it just because lots more people are investing money into PPC that are just becoming overall more expensive or is there any kind of insight that you're seeing there?

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, I think it's actually several things. The first one is some of these categories are definitely just becoming increasingly expensive. Even if the math doesn't make sense, let's say you're selling a supplement for$ 18 and the cost per click is five, even if your conversion rate is really strong, I don't know, let's say 30%, the math on that like probably doesn't make sense at scale. You would be spending money there just to break even or even lose a little bit of money just so you can be in the top sponsor products slots. The way to play that game in 2021, in my opinion, is not to force the issue. You can bid at levels that make sense for you. It's what? People would call value- based bidding, maybe it's not worth$ 5, maybe it's worth two and a half and at that CPC level with that same conversion rate, even if you're not the top ad, you can still make money on advertising, if that's your kind of stated purpose of that campaign or that particular product at that time. I would say in 2018, used to be able to just throw a bunch of money out of given keyword on Amazon, like spend a crap ton of money against something. Even if the conversion rate wasn't great, well, you got lots of clicks, you got lots of impressions, and lots of people visit the page and everyone doing that was helping Amazon's algorithm basically say, " Okay, this is relevant for this keyword and let's get it to the top," but now I think Amazon's way more focused on conversions and add to carts and actual purchases than they are just amount of money you spend because I see all the time these brands that appear, spend probably tremendous amount of money, tens of thousands of dollars in the course of a month or several weeks on these big terms, which usually are quite broad turns too. They're not like longtail terms that are super specific and they get a conversion rate on that that's like maybe okay, but they're just burning cash. That's not really the way to do it in 2021 anymore. I think the way to do it now is to focus on the creative assets. You can add to sponsored brands and sponsored display, video, going through other companies like this company called Seller Rocket, that I've been talking to recently, and we've referred some clients to them. They do like these editorial placements on Amazon crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: Affiliate editorial. Yeah.

Brent Zahradnik: This stuff is all like, this is 2021. This is like the way to play the game these days. That tactic of just saying, " All right, here's this one keyword. Let's spend$ 10,000 on it this month." That's not the way to do it anymore. I recently audited an account that had done that and inaudible cost is like 180% and they spent$ 33,000 on one keyword of the course of two months. It didn't work out for them, basically. It did not have the intended effect. Even though the product itself was very strong, had tons of reviews, great price point, has a name, it's pretty well known in the space, they were just trying to get it to re- rank for this one thing, but no, it didn't work. There's other ways to do that these days.

Ryan Cramer: I was going to say, for just a month or two, that sounds like that's something that there's nothing of a forecast that you can really predict. How much am I actually going to spend or you can always do an arbitrary, what did I spend last year, maybe give a percentage increase of that. In fact, that might completely get blown out in a month and you're a month short or again, with this other caveat of I might run out of inventory and I mean, that's a whole drama in itself. That being said, if people want to pace themselves, I know you said spin pacing, I don't think I've ever heard that phrase being used in terms of a predictive analysis. Is there an algorithm or is there a tactic that people should be using in order to make sure they don't A, run out of money and B, they diversify it so they can get all their spending, and they can sell as much as they want to/ need to?

Brent Zahradnik: Sure. Yeah, I think that we've seen an increasing demand for sophistication of budgetary allocation from our clients this year. I think part of the reason for that is because there's been a steady increase in budget- related features that are showing up in the advertising console entity and to the API, and I can talk about some of those specifically but I would encourage speaking to you as the listener as a business owner to seller, talk to your internal person, talk to your agency, talk to your marketing friend who does it for you at the business, whoever manages your ads, and have a conversation with them about, what's our monthly budget and then how do we break that down into individual product lines or product families and then start to get even more granular. What kind of campaigns are we going to use between those product families? Just keep drilling down into it. It doesn't mean you have to stick exactly to this plan, but it could be really a good idea to say, " Okay, we're going to spend 40,000 this month, 4, 000 USD, and of that 7, 000 is going to go to our top seller that has three variations and we know that the black one sells the best and the red and the yellow are pretty good, but you will put keywords for those too but of that, let's say 70% of that is sponsored product spend and 20% is sponsored brands, 10% sponsored display, let's make sure we have some video in there. Let's allocate a little bit of money for that and then you can start to back out individual budgets at the portfolio level or at the campaign level from there. Amazon is adding new features that make some of that stuff easier, actually. We're really thankful that they're doing this. Everyone's getting access to these things. It's not just us at the agency side. This is the stuff that's appearing inside of advertising console. We log in some mornings are like, a new present. It's like Christmas every couple weeks with Amazon these days and budgets. Ryan, I think you're muted.

Ryan Cramer: There it is. I got notified. I was like, your mic is muted and you're talking you idiot." That's, again, I do this 153 episodes and I try to move things around and not make noise because it's important to hear what you're saying and I don't want to have noise in the background, but that being said, I've noticed a lot of new features in the really recent weeks on the buyers side, the different things that are highlighting actually always goes back to the importance of video, ads and whatnot, sponsored display. Very important it almost like circles the product of, I've heard this phrase with one of the brands we had on here, she said, her name is Cara and she her brain is SnoozeShade. She's over in the United Kingdom. She back in one of her episodes, she loves it when she can circle keywords with sponsored ads. Almost the fact of you can see your organic, your click- through rate and your engagement rate, your sell through rate actually go up because seller she in her mind, they're not trusting of us all the time. Although, it'd be up, she almost wants to circle the wagons or the keyword if you will, and kind of funnel people there for the organic listing. That's one of my wife naturally is the clicker on sponsored ads because they're everywhere. It's almost impossible not to click on the sponsored ad at any given time.

Brent Zahradnik: I think I've spoken of myself if I think it's really relevant. I was a shopper on Amazon, but I'm always very conscious like, " Okay, if I don't buy, I'm costing this person some money, right?"

Ryan Cramer: Exactly.

Brent Zahradnik: This is crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: Which is also something of like-

Brent Zahradnik: crosstalk but not totally sure.

Ryan Cramer: Exactly, which is also something like, " Oh, I clicked on it." Me, conscientiously of them, do I want to make, my intend to purchase is there and always trying to assist people. Would they rather have it as a click on a sponsored ad or me to click and find it and organically click on it? At the end of the day, but I've noticed new features. Like you said, the more options, click down on the mobile side and then also highlighting product video. I think is super interesting going back to video ads, going back to the importance of diversifying and being listed on Brand Registry, there's all these kinds of new, cool, unique features that actually make your listing, I think a little bit bigger. It kind of stretches your screen a little bit more and makes it stand out all these different functionalities on top of, " Hey, we are certified for these, we have this certification. We have all these different things. All these things that you can add on top of your-

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, crosstalk footprint.

Brent Zahradnik: The one what

Brent Zahradnik: comes to mind for me is the bundles. You have the ability to make bundles and then those bundles will show up under your primary photos. Actually, what that does is effectively pushes down some of those sponsored product, the sponsored display ad slots further down the fold, so to speak, further down the page. We have clients that have a lot of success with bundles because they just bundle products that naturally go together. What's interesting about bundles, you can actually run sponsored brand campaigns direct to a bundle. You can't do that with sponsored products or sponsored display, but you can use brands, that campaign type to run direct to a bundle. Yeah, it's pretty cool. They're products that naturally complementing each other. You mentioned also, brand analytics. Brand analytics has a cool thing. That's like market basket analysis or something like that. Basically, it will combine, well inaudible what products within your catalog that have been bought with each other. That's like, okay if 10% of people buy these two products together, why don't I make a bundle? I mean, the data is right here. Let's give it a shot. There's another one that shows you products that shoppers have examined before buying yours or looking at yours. This is the way you can use sponsor display to get on those pages too while looking at what aces competitors are. A lot of times are ones that you're probably familiar with already if you know your space, you know your market on Amazon but still it's quite helpful.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the other thing, the other major thing that I mean this month for some reason is actually been a high buy on Amazon for one reason or another but at the end of your purchase, there's this call function of follow brands that you purchase from. It could be you the seller, following you the seller or like an actual 1P brand. It could be, for example, I bought a fan because it's hot as I'll get out here. In Indiana, doesn't know what season is. It's cold. It's hot. It's all over the place.

Brent Zahradnik: I know it's like, but yeah.

Ryan Cramer: I got to crosstalk. Exactly. I mean, just here in the Midwest, it's nauseating at times. This is seasons. If you love seasons, come here and you're going to get them all 100 times a year but that being said, the brands itself that your calling out like our Honeywell but also if you have brand registered products, they will ask you and say, " Hey, would you follow these products for new and upcoming product releases." Also, super fascinating to know that you can run obviously campaigns to those people who posts things like that. What's kind of your take on Amazon funneling and making this really actually belligerent call out to follow brands, not products? Don't just come here for products, get involved with the brand itself.

Brent Zahradnik: This is not inaudible click follow from the store page, the Amazon store page...

Ryan Cramer: That too.

Brent Zahradnik: ...but you're sending this prompt when you do checkout. I'm actually not super familiar with that even as an Amazon shopper. I bought something just last week, but I don't think I saw that.

Ryan Cramer: I think, it might have been mobile only but if I can find an image, I will put it up for all of our viewers but then listeners, if you're curious, I think I've been a post about this on LinkedIn a couple, actually a couple days ago. What it is, is specifically highlighting yeah, right after purchase it is, it's right here, it was very recently, so it shouldn't be that far down.

Brent Zahradnik: crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: It's a follow function. Yeah, when you go to the page itself, so for the listeners, if you're going to a brand page, if you shopping on Amazon, you find a product page, bought and sold, buy it, or buy this product underneath the title of the product, title page or the title of the product itself, you can click on that brand and when you go to the brand, you can filter by products or whatever they themselves are putting on about the product company bestsellers, so on and so forth but there is an actual functionality where you can follow them for new product releases, you get prompted by either push notification, I believe on mobile or you can actually be emailed of new products. The brand itself houses analytics and actually creates this, I think, unique opt- in to a brand of, " Hey, I like this product. I want to know about new features are coming out." Almost like when's the new Apple iPhone coming out, people want to get notified of all those new releases. In theory, this in itself is again, so many pictures for some reason, all right, here we go. All right. Let me post it up to the camera real quick and see if my screen can do it. When I ordered this brand for the follow the brands from your purchase, or will be a brand that actually is its own three P brand and then co- way which are filters. Again, these are products that are, let me refocus in there, for the brand itself, obviously, there's lots of different costs to that. I think it's very fascinating that at the very end when you make that purchase, thank you for your confirmation, it says now follow the brands from your purchase. I think that's a super interesting call out that you can start to now engage with that brand and it's really highlighting that fact. Is that going to maybe push its way down to any sort of ad products or any sort of campaign features that you can-

Brent Zahradnik: I know you can send out these emails to those that follow your brand, right?

Ryan Cramer: Right.

Brent Zahradnik: You can send me an email that is actually from Amazon, but it's through the follow feature, right? They still kind of own the customer and they have that following relationship because they're following you on their platform but you can say, here's a new product we launched and technically I think the window for that is like 90 days. If you launch the product anytime in past like three months, it could be like, " It's new, look," even if it didn't come out today. I know that clients have taken advantage of that like straightaway, with people who, we just said, " Hey, try this out." That's something we managed from the ad side honestly but interesting. I don't know if they had super crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah, I was going to say in that grain, if you will, I think the way people are getting smarter, more innovative. Have you seen people run campaigns in terms of a following on Amazon campaign or is it all strictly going to products instead of to the product storefront, if you will?

Brent Zahradnik: No.

Ryan Cramer: Or the brainstorm front.

Brent Zahradnik: We haven't done any of that. That's an interesting idea but there's no facility that I'm aware of to prompt a shopper to take that action directly because, I guess if they're checking out like you just showed on screen on mobile, they'll get it. I was going to say earlier, I'm like an old man when it comes to eCommerce. I just buy stuff like on my computer. I don't like the mobile experience as much but I think that I'm in an increasing minority there. I wasn't showing that same screen but the follow opportunity, maybe it's because the brands I was purchasing from, simply don't have that set off too. That could also be the case but, yeah.

Ryan Cramer: That was interesting. I did find the 3P seller They were selling Eric filters, that's something that is just, again, the mobile experience for me and I know a lot of people are just using a more as, " Hey, we need to get this product," and I'm like, " Oops, scan product," whatever I have like if I ran out of the things, scan the barcode, pull it up on Amazon and boom, purchase or almost the subscribe and save again functionalities are there's all these different black holes we can go down to. With that, there was another, we're talking about ads too and the big no- no was always or the big faux pas, if you will. Something can come in from a mutual friend, I believe, of ours is Liran Hirschkorn of Incrementum Digital, he had posted something very-

Brent Zahradnik: crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: He posted most recently an insert I thought was very fascinating. It was a, " Hey, instead of a rate us on Amazon to get gift card XYZ, post a video of yourself using product XYZ and use hashtag this on TikTok. If you have over this many views on TikTok, email us with that video, the link to it, and your order number and we'll send you$ 500 gift card."

Brent Zahradnik: Wow.

Ryan Cramer: My mind was blown. Doesn't go against TOS in any way, shape or form and what I believe you're not rating Amazon on inaudible. You're not actually calling out your product at all to do anything on Amazon. You're saying, " Hey, post is on TikTok. Use this hashtag. Use the product itself and then if it gets over this many views, you got yourself some money." You literally are creating micro influencers or you're actually banking on the fact of people seeing your products, which more and more traffic's being driven to your product listing. If it's using it and you have your order number, verified to you, it's the same concept, you're just driving people in a different way to get to Amazon. How ingenius is that?

Brent Zahradnik: crosstalk too. Instead of having to go out and search for specific influencers, they're kind of coming to you if they're, I guess, savvy enough to read the insert because I'm sure some people don't read the insert. That might be a shame but those that do.

Ryan Cramer: I'm always reading the insert because I'm fascinating how people want to call it out crosstalk.

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, I do that too. I think being in the industry, we just have a nature of doing it. Even in France, there's a lot of 3P sellers that I order from. Actually, I ordered this. This is very specific but I ordered this kind of cinnamon, high end cinnamon and they have a cool insert in there and they like, " Tell the story of how it came to be, where it's starts from and story about the brand." They're like, " Check out our social media." It's just well- done. It's just cinnamon but I love cooking a lot and things like that.

Ryan Cramer: I think another one I always highlight is when you purchase through our brand, like specifically our storefront, we always make a donation to our local YMCA or local boys and girls club, it's almost like the Bombas mentality or the Tom's of, " You buy, one we donate one," mentality of, " Hey, you know for a fact that some person in need is going to be getting a goods in this regard," always like that. It kind of tugs at your heartstrings, but I like the social media tact. With that being said, you guys in your agency, I know that's a lot of Amazon's- based strategies, is there something we're testing this year, maybe testing ads on social media to drive traffic to Amazon, more of maybe TikTok or maybe Instagram or, I know Facebook has kind of like pissed a lot of people off in terms of how often and how much you can send traffic to Amazon. Is there any other crosstalk?

Brent Zahradnik: I mean, I personally think that the best move is using Google Ads to send to an Amazon store page, a storefront, because that provides a very soft, landing bounce, if you will. You're not sending a direct to a product page. You're sending them to a place where you have total control over kind of what is seen on there. If you have really good branding and videos and copy and nice navigation on that page, you can send them to the specific subcategories there. It also doesn't impact your conversion rate on your actual product page, right? If they do want to buy, they can even, in some cases, click buy now from that page. They don't have to visit the product page, and if they're really interested, they'll go to the product page and maybe they'll have a higher chance of converting, since they've already been kind of through your gauntlet of, " Here's our video. Here's our brand identity. Here's our logo. Here's the stuff that they want to crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: What's getting the conversion... Sorry, Brent, what's getting the conversion on that? Is it the ad itself or is it going to be you're directing them to the page, but then they themselves navigate to a random product? Are you still giving attribution to the ad itself? Is Amazon counting that?

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, I think that's still the big missing link because Amazon and Google are not playing nice together. You can't put in the code like you want on your own website and have the traffic go from Google Search direct through and then be attributed correctly. I know Amazon attribution, I think they're now rolling it into advertising console because it's been out in the cold and some like weird beta land for a long time but as I understand that they're actually limiting some of the features. I don't think that they have any intention of making their Amazon attribution work with Google Ads, basically.

Ryan Cramer: Right, no URL crosstalk.

Brent Zahradnik: I'm speaking for crosstalk experience of just having done it a couple times. We don't really offer this as a service at Pathfinder because, yet again, it's like a black box when it comes to attribution. We're really focused on the Amazon internal stuff still, and probably always will be, quite honestly. We like to stick with that. In fact, I want to talk about some of the budget stuff, if I could highlight some of these things.

Ryan Cramer: Let's do it. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say, let's get back to original topic and then we, I drew us off base, lots of different features and functionality that kind of alluded to conversion, but let's go back to our initial points, go and kick us off, for sure.

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, sure. There's like three things I have written down here that I wanted to talk about. These are all these new features that have come out. The first one is this budget's tab. If you're inside of advertising console, you'll notice and this is a bit hard to do without visual, but if you log in, you'll see a thing called budgets up in the top left, and it says beta next to the gray box. This is basically a new way to look at your campaigns. It's only sponsored products campaigns for now but the idea here is, there's a couple of new columns of data that it gives you the most useful one, in my opinion, is average time in budget. You can actually sort and filter by average time and budget. You can say, here's the date range I'm going to set, it's the last three days, let's say September 13th, 14th, or I guess 12, 13, 14. I don't want to include today, for obvious reasons. Then, we can say what campaigns have been in budget less than 50%. By doing that filter, you'll see, here all the sponsored product campaigns that actually have spent a very low amount of time in budget, actively spending, actively working. Previously, we've had to rely on just being inside of the advertising console and seeing when campaigns went out of budget. Amazon did add a filter for that like some time ago, but there's always a bit of a delay anyway. This gives you like more of a zoom out helicopter view on that. If you know that, you can start to make changes based on it. Now, ideally, you want campaigns to be running and active and in budget, there are times when you don't want to campaign in budget all the time, maybe it's an auto campaign, it's just there to serve one particular purpose and it's supposed to run out of budget but if you notice in there, your high budget, really important campaigns for priority keywords or targets, your competitors, protecting your brand, whatever, this new column gives you a really good piece of information that's very, very actionable.

Ryan Cramer: That's cool. I think that's really neat. I mean, obviously there's lots of takeaways too like tweaking and more insight and inaudible is never a bad thing to have, right?

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah.

Ryan Cramer: The fact that Amazon's giving you the kind of those things to kind of weaponize like optimize, I would say what has to be inaudible but optimize those campaigns, if you will, on tweaking it, that, you are getting to, maximizing every campaign that you can possibly, very cool. Is there a case study or takeaway that you've seen by using that, you've been able to make lift anywhere, shape or form?

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah. It's led us to do two things. Let's say that a campaign is a priority campaign and we see that this average time in budget is low, a lower percentage would mean, it's not spending a lot of the hours when you probably want it to. That scenario, you would want to go into the campaign and first of all examine what is the purpose of it, right? Are these keywords? Are they being over bid? Bidding$ 7 and we shouldn't be and that's why it's burning through the budget, or actually, are we bidding on track and the metrics are looking good, and we want this campaign to be in budget 100% of the time. Well, if that's the case, then we probably need to increase the campaigns daily allocation. If we're working out at a portfolio level, make sure that the portfolio amount through the month or through the time frame it's allocated, is also lined up properly. When you're doing budget stuff, always work from the smallest thing up. When you're allocating budget, always kind of work from the top down because you want to investigate, first of all, is there a keyword that spending 70% of this budget and is burning through it? Well, that's an easy fix. You start there and work your way up. Yeah, and I think the other thing it's caused us to do is realize that, " Hey, some of these campaigns aren't spending our time. We actually don't need them to it. It's fine." It's fine because this is an auto campaign. It has a$ 15 budget per day. The whole point of it is to just run like a little bit. It's not supposed to burn through all the cash. That's fine. I think that the cynical take on this would be that Amazon and I don't necessarily disagree with this, by the way, I'm just saying like, it is a cynical take. I'm trying to hold these two things in my mind simultaneously, is that Amazon is doing this to just encourage us to spend more money, right? They're trying to show you the opportunities that you missed. Along with this active time and budget, there's other columns that are missed clicks, missed impressions, clicks and then the big one, sales, missed sales. A lot of sellers look at that and they're like, they shriek and they freak out, because they're like, " Look at the sales we missed." Of course, this is an estimate. This is not factual reality. You can't prove something that didn't even happen. Can't prove a negative but-

Ryan Cramer: Amazon's actually calling out if you would have spent another $1, 000 for this campaign, you would have achieved more sales in XYZ?

Brent Zahradnik: Exactly. Look at these impressions you could have had. Look at this. If it was in budget 100% of the times without assuming with this calculation, look at the sales you would have had. Now, if your campaign is 80% A cost and you're spending against one keyword in there that's burning through your budget, well, it doesn't matter if you could add more sales because it would have been not profitable anyway. This is why you need to step back and look at that first before you jump in and just start increasing budgets for campaigns across the board but it does give us, like you said, more data. It's hard to kind of argue with that. Like in general, I'm very, very bullish on this feature. It's wonderful. We love it.

Ryan Cramer: That's awesome. Is there for the campaigns you're going to be running, obviously, in the next 100 plus days or so, or less than 100 days, is there a percentage amount that you want majority of your campaigns to be doing the amount of sales, like the 80/20 rule, 80% of your business comes from 20% of your campaigns. I want to think that's been applicable to. You don't want that to be applicable to your PPC campaigns. What's kind of the rule of thumb in Q4?

Brent Zahradnik: I would say, in general, the more budget that a client has to allocate the more interesting things we can do because there is like an order of operations in Amazon advertising. We wouldn't start with spending a bunch of money on sponsored display. That wouldn't be the first thing we would do but if we have matched demand and met the kind of capacity that we think is appropriate for spend and the returns we're getting from it from some of the more basic campaign types, like we start from the bottom and work our way up, then we're going to be spending against sponsored display. For just for an example, right? There's a sort of order of operations there. Now, in some accounts, it's true that we'll be spending a lot of money against, let's say, like one or two exact match campaigns for one keyword or handful of keywords. If that matches with what the client's objective is, then that's fine but, man, there's really no hard and fast rule. I mean, there's definitely campaigns that punch above their weight. Those would be the ones targeting the big I would say longer tail keywords that are like hyper relevant for that product but you're going to have campaigns that spend a lot less than are targeting really long tail terms and then those that are targeting like I would say, top of funnel less, relevant terms as well. You should be spending on all stages of that funnel but it's the ones in the middle that are the ones that probably are driving the most in terms of actual sales. We're starting to get more information. Actually, this is kind of unrelated to budgets but sponsored display as an ad type is very interesting, because it's display. It's not click, right? The cost model is still cost per click, I think in many cases, for Amazon's but there is cost per impression that does exist in some small capacity. What's interesting is Amazon is now giving us more information on attribution for views. The way you usually measure display advertising is you'd say, " How many people viewed this?" It doesn't necessarily mean they clicked it. If someone viewed it, what kind of credit do we give that ad? Maybe someone has saw your supplement like 14 times in sponsored display campaigns, and then they finally when they bought it, but they never actually clicked any ad. Who gets credit? Does the ad get credit? Does the organic get credit this? This is where crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah. It's the marketer's Catch 22. He will love who gets credit for which campaign because I swear to God, there's this, there's a brand of, obviously, I'm in podcasting, we do video elements. There's a brand that come up with like video lights. Always view it. I clicked on maybe once, and then all of a sudden, now it's everywhere. It's on Facebook. It's on LinkedIn. It's Follow me on Google. It's on Amazon.

Brent Zahradnik: They got you.

Ryan Cramer: They got me, right? They got the click. Somebody won. Then I went a couple times to their website. Obviously, then they'll pixel me and follow me around with the specific product they take a look at. Then, obviously, like, what's your intent? Then they start to feed you coupons and things like that. It's just kind of what's going to make you push it over? Is it the retargeting campaign is going to be brand awareness campaign, is going to be just in pricing, all these different things. You guys put a little bit more weight on the specific ads, if you will, in Q4 or is there... It's just whatever can convert and why it's converting. It really, really doesn't matter.

Brent Zahradnik: Well, what's interesting about Q4 and this is actually super relevant to the next thing I want to talk about the budgets...

Ryan Cramer: Sure.

Brent Zahradnik: ...is where you're spending, when you're allocating the spend because we can look at historical data for our clients in aggregate we haven't stored. We can look at this. We can say, " This day, in particular, was horrible for conversion rates." It was 5%, which on Amazon for ads is like not great but this the year across the board for our clients, and then we can break it out by different marketplaces like Mexico, US, whatever, but it was 13%. We would probably rather want to spend more money on the day when it was 13% than the day when it was 5%. Let's just look at last year. Let's drill down to this client. Let's look at information we have in software that we used but also the software that we keep as far as like archiving data. That is where this next thing comes in, which is the budget rules per campaign. This is something is really exciting. If you go into a sponsored product campaign, yet, again, this is just sponsored products, you can augment budgets based on either a schedule or performance metrics. The way that this first came out, Ryan, it was really exciting was like just the schedule, super basic. It was like, you can boost your campaigns for Halloween. Amazon said, " Here's the suggested dates that we give you for Halloween." I was like, five days around the Halloween, inaudible up or something like that. The idea of being, your campaigns that you're specifying, this one you're working in right now, it's going to automatically boost according to this schedule. We haven't, in the past, had the ability to do this, like built into Amazon. There are softwares that do this. We've used those in the past. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, sometimes you have to go to the campaign console at 2: 00 in the morning and do it yourself or you have to get team members in a different time zone to do it but now we do have a built- in feature for this. Stands to reason, everybody wins. We allocate more money towards the right campaigns for the right products at the right time. Amazon gets more of our spend but yet again, we have increased performance in sales during that time period. They're called budget rules. You can add these budget rules to the sponsored products. The other way that they've done this recently, which is even more exciting for us because we're on the nerdy side of ads is performance space. You can say this A cost, this click- through rate and I think the last one is maybe conversion rate is of a certain amount, let's say A cost is some 25%. If that's the case, I would like this campaign to be boosted. I want to increase the budget. You could do it by percentage, like 25%. Then, you have the campaigns that are like, it's kind of a Darwinian process, right? Those that are the good performers, why would you not want to pour more gasoline on those, and then conversely the ones that suck, well, too bad, they're going to be decreased by 30%, or whatever. Yet, again, this is possible through third party software, and we've done that for years but now it's actually built into the interface. You can go in there and you can see it and hopefully, it's going to be supported to the add API, if it's not already. They're going to keep building on this feature. It's really exciting, actually. This is when you could use data from last year or you could say, " Hey, we know Halloween is big for this particular grouping of products. Let's make sure we have these budget rules in place." Then, we don't have to get up at 2:00 in the morning and do it ourselves or have our VA from a different time zone do it, Amazon's software is going to do it for us.

Ryan Cramer: That's amazing. I mean, those are great functionalities that obviously should have probably existed probably years ago but hey, they're caught up and now people like you and me and everyone out there who's running agency, running multiple brands, this is obviously very klatch. I've always, I've kind of thought about this too. You said, using other tools, I'm a big component of letting other people's data kind of work for you, what I mean by that, it's obviously not copying, it's essentially when to start planning. If we're talking about seasonal products, I think you and maybe everyone else can agree that it's always when people put, like a retail store, so I'm going to use retail stores as almost this data analyses kind of test area, if you will, of when products might start to be good to start adding and maybe advertising and maybe putting more spin into, is they on a retail side like Walmart or Hobby Lobby or anything like that, you'd see seasonal products come out pretty darn early. You see, Halloween probably hit right around Labor Day. That'd be September 6. That's two months in time. That data, they have data that shows that this is the time when people start to actually purchase products now it's going to ramp up quickly but should that be another resource that's free that people can just go into their local convenient stores or retail box stores or whatnot, see what they're pushing in normal's time, go back to their computer, if you will, and time that up with what other data retail stores are doing. Does that make sense?

Brent Zahradnik: It makes a lot of sense.

Ryan Cramer: They have the data that says this is the time where we should have product on the shelf. Should I reflect my sales and go against retail data that clearly they're bigger and they know what they're doing? They won't just put it on the floor. It wasn't going to move, but is that like an easy win or crosstalk?

Brent Zahradnik: Yeah, the reason I'm sitting here and staring into spaces because I never thought of it before. It's great.

Ryan Cramer: Clearly too, when we're, I almost think about every time I have this conversation and my wife's like, " Let's go. Let's do crafts. Let's do," which is fantastic and I always go into Hobby Lobby and I think I just started seeing Christmas stuff. This is September. We saw Christmas decor come out. Prominently, it's all Halloween and that's fall Halloween but that hit in into July early September.

Brent Zahradnik: That seems very crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: I mean, it seems very early but this is kind of where I guess it supports my theory of I think, I think this is the year where you're going to see a lot earlier peaks in the sales to start even earlier for seasonal products specifically with just the intent to buy for Christmas holidays, anything like that's going to be way pushed out earlier. That's kind of my theory. That's my Q4 bold prediction, if you will, of you're going to see this more major bell curve, not peaks and valleys like we always see. I think it's going to be pretty consistent across the board, hopefully not but maybe crosstalk.

Brent Zahradnik: crosstalk, which is what I mentioned but this the budget rules is when Amazon first came out with this feature, they had that's called recommended events. They say, " Hey, take a look at these events that are coming up," and I think they're probably going to keep that refreshed but I'm assuming what they have done is said, we know as Amazon, of course they have the best data of anyone about the platform. This is when spend is at a high for these time periods. It's really cool because they tell you the dates and you can set it right there. They're giving us that information. Now, yet again, we can take, let's put our cynical hat on and say, " Yeah, well it's Amazon." They're going to say, " Spend a lot before, during and after the event please," but I want to believe that they are giving us some good guidance there but I really crosstalk some idea too. It's super cool.

Ryan Cramer: Well, I think that's just a free and easy way to start knowing when there's data. They're not just throwing their inventory on the floor. The whole point of retail is put stuff that's going to move in sale. If it's on sale, you go into Best Buy, if it's on sale, it's going to be sitting there on the floor. You're going to see it more prominently displayed. They want to get rid of it so they can make inventory for new stuff. That being said, people are not just going to arbitrarily just start buying random stuff when it's just sitting there. I'm not buying Christmas stuff in March. That's just not going to happen unless it's a ridiculous deal, price takes over and that's a different psychology behind it but when people start to buy those traditional trends and they're like retail is almost, they have the best data too, they can see across the board when do I put it out there, when do I pull out inventory or for just seasonal products and what do I keep consistently there? crosstalk shelf just-

Brent Zahradnik: crosstalk challenges than we do on the advertising side are Amazon sellers do, right?

Ryan Cramer: Right.

Brent Zahradnik: Because I think a lot of our clients would be like, " Well, why was this product such a success? Where does the traffic come from?" The answer is like...

Ryan Cramer: Yeah.

Ryan Cramer: Well,

Ryan Cramer: again, and that's the thing is like it can be manufactured, which a lot but you said the cynical side of Amazon manufacturing people to start thinking about this, like now's the time to start thinking about it. Again, it doesn't matter who's telling you this person, if there's someone inaudible that says, " Maybe I should buy my Christmas gifts now," or" I should start buying my decor for holiday décor now," I might just buy like, " I like that. I'm going to buy it today." I'm here might as well do that. Same thing with online, if you start getting prompted, again, in theory, If you're prompting earlier and earlier, your people are going to start to think about and plan for that as time comes out. No one wants, I always am a person of, " Oh, that snuck up on me. I need to plan for that next year farther out." I think everyone wants to do that, but you need those prompts to do that. The other thing, I know we're kind of butting up on time Brent, the other quick thing I know, we saw that came out September 17th, which today is actually the 15th, if you're watching this, as the deadline for Cyber Week Lightning Deals, is there any other major component or deed that we need to be aware of, " Hey, this is a lot earlier than expected," because I think the other major one was November 3rd inventory and needs to be in warehouse before cyber week. Then, the deadline for holiday coupons was November 29th, which is still a bit out but I have some take some crosstalk.

Brent Zahradnik: One thing that's budget related and this goes back to that budget rule that I mentioned, and yet again, was available through software but now this is the time for you as a seller or you as a person who does PPC on Amazon to say, " Well, if we know that this day is a day when we have a lightning deal or a coupon or some other kind of deal, whatever it is, deal of the day," there's many kinds of deals now. I can barely keep them all straight, that would be the time to make sure that you are maximizing your spend and exposure for that deal during the time period. You'd be able to set your goal for a specific time period. Let's increase budget by 300%. That's pretty wild, right? But you could do that. One thing I'll mention that the listeners or viewers might not realize is that when you do have a deal of the day or a lightning deal or whatever your auto campaigns get different placements that they don't have when you don't have that going on. You should be running actively auto campaigns during that time period. If you've ever seen like today's deal placement as like a target and you're targeting report or your search term report for Amazon's ads, that's what that is. You're basically getting a crap ton of exposure for that particular ad campaign. You'll see that has sometimes like tens of thousands of impressions but it's really over the course of like, I don't know, two days or like four and a half hours or whatever lightning deal is or daily deal is these days. You want to make sure that you have a budget allocated for those and then yet again, you must work your way up. Make sure that the portfolio low budget, if you have one set properly and then your account level budget cap is also set appropriately because it's possible you could say, " Hey, $ 300 to this campaign and then well that's good." It spends on that, but then that same set of campaigns gets capped by the overall account cap or the portfolio level cap and then you've just shot yourself in the foot with that. You must work up from the bottom in order to make sure that that's all kind of stacked properly.

Ryan Cramer: Absolutely, you want to secure your foundation, if you will, and then let the other stuff kind of be on top of that without a strong base, you're not going to have a great campaigns, but that being said, I know it took that hour already, go off and all these offshoots of course. Well, we do hear on all these on this channel but for you and the team, what's kind of that last part of the year focus going into 2022? Are we traveling? Are you going to events? Are we going to speak or anything or are we just kind of hunker down, this is the good time of the year, so it's going to be optimizing, it's going to be prepping and planning budgets?

Brent Zahradnik: What else, we have, every year the same kind of thing instituted. We have a holiday blackout for certain times of the year running up to cyber week and even parts of the Halloween depending on what clients we have and a Christmas for sure. People are taking holidays and on the team. I will be traveling for a conference. I'm actually going to be in the UK in a couple of weeks for Seller Sessions. crosstalk I think you probably know, maybe there for that.

Ryan Cramer: He'll be on the podcast next week.

Brent Zahradnik: Excellent. I was just with him like last week in a different country for another reason but yeah definitely excited to be in the UK for the first time in a while and that community of sellers in the UK is just so great. We have so many good clients in the UK. We'd love to interact with and work with, had a very pleasant time with them over the years. Yeah, that's many other events but yeah, from November, December man, I got almost nothing on the calendar. Those are two very, very, very important months. October, I will be traveling, like I said the UK and I'm actually going to be doing our team meet up. We're going to do a team meet up in Spain for a lot of the European and North and Central American people on the team because we're remote. We'll be flying everybody in. Fingers crossed with COVID restrictions, man, we'll see how it goes but we didn't plan on this one for a while. That's the other big thing that's happening.

Ryan Cramer: Awesome. Well, of course, fantastic and they can reach out to obviously amzpathfinder. com, I believe is the website and then connect with you on LinkedIn. We have that in your title. Fun fact, you will see the PingPong logo on your lanyard when you're at Seller Session, fun little tidbit. We are sponsoring the lanyards this year. Won't be there in person due to some restrictions over here but just timing wise but, that's one day I always tell people go to Seller Sessions Live if you can, it's in London. London is very close and near and dear to my heart. It's my third favorite city in Europe that I've been to. It makes the top 10 if I had to do the top 10.

Brent Zahradnik: It goes on. The first time I was there, I didn't like it. Now, this is will be like my seventh or eighth visit and I just absolutely love going. It's something about it.

Ryan Cramer: Once again, yeah this is why, again, for studying abroad in England is everything in England grows on you in a good way. I love the people of England. I have a lot of great connections over there. Can't wait to get back there in person. Whenever that might be, but yeah, Seller Sessions Live. If you haven't had a chance, it's already sold out. I can't even pitch it because it's already sold out tickets crosstalk.

Brent Zahradnik: That's right. October-

Ryan Cramer: I told Danny, I was like, I'll pitch in if it's available. I guess, it's already sold out. Don't worry. Great event. I'm excited that you're going to be there. Yeah, safe travels for you and the team. I know you said it's hunker down season, but thanks for sharing the tips that you could today, Brent...

Brent Zahradnik: crosstalk.

Ryan Cramer: ...for strategies and PPC and we'll catch you again next time.

Brent Zahradnik: Sure. It's been a real pleasure. Nice talking to you as always.

Ryan Cramer: Awesome, as always. Thank you so much again, Brent of AMZ Pathfinder. Again, if you have questions or comments about anything we talked about today, you can reach out to Brent and his team here at amzpathfinder. com or you can connect with Brent on LinkedIn, best way to do it or Facebook. However, you can just Google his name and I'm sure it'll pop up but we have the links to connect with him in the comments, in the show notes as always. I'm Ryan Cramer. This is Episode 155 or 153, 155 happens in a couple days but this is Episode 153. We talked about Amazon as strategies. Again, it's coming. Q4 is almost here. Hopefully, you have the strategies and the budgets in place. If not, you need to start thinking about that today so that you have a profitable Q4 and making sure that again, the spending is not out of control. We talked about lots of great tips and tricks and obviously enhancements that Amazon has made for sellers moving forward. That being said, thanks for tuning in to Crossover Commerce. We'll catch you guys next episode when we go live on social media and then this will be also available on your favorite podcast destination. Thanks for tuning in. As always, I'm Ryan Cramer, stay tuned for our next episode in the future. Take care.