Drew Hart, your go-to guy for all things Amazon. Drew kicked off his entrepreneurial journey in 2018, launching two private label brands and now managing an Advertising Services Agency that handles over 40 brands, Vinculum (VIN-CUE-LUM), which offers a full range of Amazon services, making him a one-stop-shop for Amazon success.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn…. 

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Drew Hart, founder of Vinculum, about strategies for scaling brands on Amazon. They discuss the importance of basics like conversion rates and product listing optimization before advanced advertising. Drew shares case studies demonstrating significant brand growth through fundamental improvements and data-driven strategies. They also explore the impact of AI on digital marketing, with Drew emphasizing the need to stay informed on AI advancements. Listeners are invited to reach out to Drew for a free audit and to learn more about his agency's services.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Action Item #1: Foundational Audit First: Before diving into complex strategies, ensure to conduct a thorough audit of your Amazon account. This foundational step helps understand the current state and identifies areas for improvement, setting the stage for effective growth strategies.

Action Item #2: Innovate Marketing Strategies: Don't limit your marketing inspiration to direct competitors. Explore adjacent markets for fresh ideas.

Action Item #3: Data-Driven Optimization: Embrace data-driven approaches for optimization. Test new main images and measure effectiveness through metrics like ad click-through rates.

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures. 

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

**Josh** (00:00:00) - Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I'm your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael E Gerber, author of The E-myth, and Matt Clark from ASM. Today I am speaking with Drew Hart. He is the founder of Vinculum, and today we are going to be talking about the strategies he has been implementing in his agency that has helped explode the growth of some of the brands that he is working with. He is sharing the nitty gritty tactics and strategies with us today. And I can't wait. This episode is brought to you by the Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen Drew, I started my business back in 2015 and I grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years, but I made a lot of mistakes along the way. That made the path of getting to eight figures take a lot longer than it needed to. I made bad hiring decisions. I had to take money out of my own personal account in order to fund payroll for our team.

**Josh** (00:00:45) - Because of cash flow constraints. I was also stressed about whether our brand could survive when Covid happened, and we watched 90% of our business drop overnight. I remember wishing for a mentor who could help guide me through the maze of scaling up someone who had been there, done that, and could share all the secrets to help me overcome those obstacles. And that's why I've decided to offer one on one coaching and consulting, where I share the nitty gritty cash flow frameworks, the sales strategies, and the operating systems that have helped me scale my own business. And because I believe in giving each entrepreneur my undivided attention. I only work with three clients at a time. But first, before we get to that point, I want to make sure we're a perfect match. So, I offer a completely free, no strings attached business strategy audit normally valued at over $10,000. And I do that just to make sure that we would be the right fit. So to our listeners, if this sounds like something you're up for, drop me an email at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough Comm.

**Josh** (00:01:30) - That's E-comm with two M's. And in your subject line say I want to pick your brain and let's jump on a call and see how we can take your brand to the next level. But today I'm super excited to introduce you all to Drew Hart. He is your go to guy for all things Amazon. Drew kicked off his entrepreneurial journey in 2018, launching two private label brands and now managing an advertising services agency that handles over 40 brands. And that is vacuum, which offers a full range of Amazon services, making him a one stop shop for Amazon success. So, with that introduction, welcome to the show, drew. That sounds so good. That's amazing. Who is this guy?

**Drew** (00:02:04) - Yeah, thanks for having me, Josh. I'm excited to be here.

**Josh** (00:02:06) - Drew, I'm super excited to have you on. I know you know; you and I have crossed paths at multiple events, and I've followed a lot of the stuff that you've shared in Facebook groups and online, and you're just a wealth of information.

**Josh** (00:02:17) - So I've been super anxious to get you on the podcast because I know you're actually trying to target bigger brands now that you want to work with because you've seen a lot of success. You know, you have that playbook down to really help brands explode their growth. And I mean, drew, let's cut to the chase here. Our audience and our listeners are seven figure sellers. They want the strategies and tips to scale to eight figures and beyond. So, Drew, what's on the top of your mind right now? What are some of the actionable strategies that we could dive into today? Yeah, I.

**Drew** (00:02:45) - Mean, that's great. so, when we kind of start working with our clients, we'll do the same thing that you'll do. We'll do an audit on the account. We'll do that even before we start working with somebody. And then once we actually bring them on board, we'll complete an exhaustive, detailed roadmap that's done at a product level and then start putting a strategy and roadmap together.

**Drew** (00:03:04) - I'll be honest, like what we find, and this is true for big brands. This is true for smaller brands. It's probably 70 or 80% of the time that the first kind of phase on what we're working on is really boring. It's optimizations. Right. But the difference is, not that optimization itself is, you know, low value or a boring topic. It's more about how you go about doing it. So, for instance, we look at conversion rates around relevant search terms. So, this is like a really key concept. Entrepreneurs or brand sellers or you know, brand owners or sellers, they'll look at their performance and they try to get granular. They want to get granular, but there's only so much time that you can kind of dig into those details. but we work with them on core concepts to understand where and how to look at data in a strategic way. And I'll give you an example. This is how we look at it. And we want our clients to look at it the same way because that way we're aligned.

**Drew** (00:03:50) - But if you look at your product and let's say you can't get the ACOs down to a target level and we're using ACOs, we know tacos are the ultimate measure. Let's say you want to get ACOs down to below 40%. That's your goal. I mean, ideally you want to do 30, but you're one step at a time. Currently you're at 50. And no matter what you're doing, you're really not able to get there. And so, the question becomes, well, do I have inefficient advertising, or do I have a product problem? Right? Do I have something else going on in the competition, etc. And so, one of the approaches that we do is we will actually be very relevancy focused on the data. So, we're really only looking at search terms that have like really specific, root words included in any of the search terms and the patterns of it. So, one of the things, one of the examples that we go through is like a snorkel mask. And there's two types of snorkel masks, right? There's one that fits over your eyes and just your nose, and there's another one that goes over your full face.

**Drew** (00:04:31) - The search terms for those are shared and different. So, if you want to know if the full-face snorkel mask, assuming that that's your product is performing well, you need to be looking at search terms that represent full face snorkel masks. Not the ambiguous ones, not the ones that might be shared. And what you're doing then is you're actually not isolating the data in and around relevancy, and you're trying to understand the performance metrics around that. When you do this, you get rid of all the bullshit you get rid of, like wasted 17 clicks and zero orders. And while that word's not really mine or that one performed in the past and I'm not. Sure anymore. If you want to understand how well your product is performing, one of the first things we'll do is we'll start looking at those root words and then kind of zero in on relevancy there. It becomes a really advantageous way to do diagnostics. Once you have that now you can put a plan together.

**Josh** (00:05:12) - Yeah. Drew, I love that.

**Josh** (00:05:13) - I think that and sorry to cut you off, but I feel like that is so important for people to like, understand that it all starts with the basics. And you and I touched on this briefly before we hit the record button, but you mentioned that one of the issues that you're seeing is that you have brands that come over and they're like, hey, I want to explode my sales. Like, surely you can. You have some magical advertising strategies that you can implement that are just going to drive my tacos super low. And it's just, just follow the best practices and everything's going to be okay. Whereas kind of what I'm hearing is like, you need to almost get back to the basics and figure out like, what's your conversion rate? Like how is your main image, right? Like how is your title crafted? What are your bullet points? What's in your back-end search terms. So, is that kind of where you start? Do you look at the title? Do you look at the main image? Are you looking at conversion rate and are you comparing it to the competitors? If so, what conversion rates are you using? Brand metrics, brand analytics, etc.?

**Drew** (00:06:06) - Yeah, so there's kind of two parts to the listing conversion rate.

**Drew** (00:06:09) - And the way that we look at it is there's a kind of a technical side which is like optimizing for the A9 engine. And then there's sort of the more, you know, qualitative side where you're trying to make sure your listing is resonating with the shopper, the people that buy or your shoppers. So, exposure awareness, ranking, indexing, all those types of things at the technical side. And we use all the tools that everyone on this call is going to be familiar with. Right. We use helium ten. We don't use Jungle Scout for no other reason than we just do. But we use Data Dive, and we have our own little methodologies for kind of like a checklist of going through, like if we're trying to rank or, you know, be indexed for a specific search term or set of words, we'll come up with our own methodologies for optimizing the title of the bullets and all the contents. But that part to me is, you know, that's pretty well known. There's a lot of playbooks out there that describe what that is and how that looks.

**Drew** (00:06:53) - The part that I feel like we do that's in addition to or different, that really impacts these brands is that we go through a report that we call its very simple name. It's a product listing assessment. We call it a PLA. We have a brand, we should have it branded. But that report consists of like four parts. And I'll go through the parts. But the whole point of it is that we're trying to move away from making subjective decisions about what's best for the listing and move into more of a data driven arena. So, the four components start out with a landscape analysis, and if we use that snorkel mask example, when you want to understand how your competitors are doing, you may want to look at both of those markets. You're going to want to look at the full-face snorkel mask as a market by itself. And then you maybe want to look at snorkel masks as a whole without them or with them mixed in or whatever. There are reasons to do any one of those three scenarios, but the idea is that you can control the data and get your competitor list refined based on whatever your needs are.

**Drew** (00:07:41) - So once you kind of have that, then what we're doing is we'll go look at the top ten, top 20 competitors, highly refined, like everything's really relevancy focused here. The list of competitors is relevant. Then we'll go and we'll scrape their shopper reviews. And what we're doing is we're doing things like trying to understand what shoppers hate and love about this category. I'm not picking off one competitor. I'm not picking off your I'm not even looking at your reviews. I might just kind of get the idea across. We really look at everything in the market, and then we aggregate that data, and we start segmenting it into themes. What do shoppers love and hate about a snorkel mask? Is it fogging up? Is it comfortable? Does water leak into it? Can you blow out of it conveniently? Does it give you 360 panoramic views? You know, like all these comments kind of start showing up in the reviews and we can start creating themes that are based on real humans. The third thing that we'll do is we start from scratch.

**Drew** (00:08:28) - We have an internal process where what we're doing is we're actually trying to research what are the features of a full-face snorkel mask, like just generically. And it's not that we're not looking at our clients listing to get informed on this. What we want to do is start fresh, like a clean slate view of what would be all of the features that a shopper would care about for a snorkel mask, but we translate that from feature to benefit, and then we actually start creating the product marketing messages. And the reason we do this is sellers are really notorious for talking about their products in very functional and factual ways, like your products like, I've got the best paper right. The paper is really well, that's not really like an emotive shopper position kind of phrase, even though that's how we would talk about it, as in a working relationship. So we get these product marketing messages put together. Then we have shopper feedback. It all starts with a really clean list. And then finally we do what most agencies do is we actually do the visual audit based on that.

**Drew** (00:09:20) - But those three first parts are really the important piece that when we're going to make these recommendations like what are they, why are they, how are they sound? And that's been pretty impactful. We worked with a client, a large aggregator out of New York, and they were selling a product. We analyzed. We did all this analysis, and I can't really reveal the product, but, for no other reason, I think that maybe that would be giving a little bit too much away. But one of the features of the product, one of the key features, was being able to convey the power of this, this home appliance. And they had it, but it really wasn't screaming out and doing it. When we made the changes both to the hero in the gallery images based on all this feedback, the click through rate literally doubled and the conversion rates went up two points and they were already at like 20%. So, they went from 20 to 22. Yeah. So, then what ends up happening here is it's a flywheel right.

**Drew** (00:10:04) - So now you get a much-improved conversion rate. Well first off, we've de-risked the idea of what the listing updates should be. Then you get a performance change on. Conversion rate. Now you feel more comfortable about taking chances on ad spend. You're going to have a much better cost of ad spend, and your tacos are going to go down. And this is a real case study. I can show it to you offline. You can validate it. But their tacos were like seven 6%. We got it to four and we grew sales. Now it sounds insane. People are like that's not it's totally possible. Now that's a really extreme example. I ended up being super good because they gave us more products to manage. But the same happens with sellers that are at like 20 and they need to get to 16, or they're at 16 and then you get to 12. But the ad strategy stuff is important too. But on the listing side, you can't ignore it. It's probably one of the most important pieces that I feel like sellers miss.

**Josh** (00:10:47) - So Drew, can you dive into any specifics with, you know, what are the biggest levers for conversion rate? Obviously, you know, being benefit driven to the end consumer. Right. Understanding what are the pain points that they're experiencing? How do you call that out? But I would imagine you have kind of a method to your madness of how you determine what the main image is going to look like, because that's going to drive your click through rate, right? And then I would imagine your secondary images are meant to be the thing that sells it to the customer, because very few people are actually reading the bullets. Very few people are reading the description. So, I would imagine, like you're packing the punch all in your listing images. Is that true? And tell me, like, how do you go about that? Any specifics you can dive into to say, hey guys, on your main image, make sure you do X, Y, or Z. I mean, every product category is obviously different, but yeah, no.

**Drew** (00:11:33) - We've got it. We have a methodology for kind of what we're trying to do is we're trying to come up with creative ideas. And the first thing that anyone's going to want to do is they're going to look at your market. So, if you're selling, let's do a home appliance, like if you're selling a steam iron or something, then if you go look at these products, by the way, they all look the same. They are literally all point left to right and sort of travel hair dryers, by the way, they all point left to right. Okay, these are just two I happen to know. They're really boring. They don't. There's no way to break up the pattern of people scrolling through all of these different listings, because we get very used to this. This is not part of our lifestyle to shop on Amazon. So, the question becomes like, well, what can I do that's unique and different? There are tons of tools out there, like in Tel Aviv and PickFu, and you can do a B testing and you should do all those things.

**Drew** (00:12:06) - I think those are all great. The question becomes like, where do you get the qualified ideas to do that? And so obviously look at your competition to see what they're doing. But we really try hard to go to adjacent markets. So, an example of something using the steam iron I actually reversed into this. I was thinking about tennis shoes. If you're trying to sell steam irons, go look. They look like tennis shoes by the way. Their form factor is like a tennis shoe. Go look at tennis shoes. If you're going to sell a cosmetic, makeup kit, go look at pencil cases. Right. Start looking at these alternative markets that are similar to what your product is and see what they're doing. And what you'll find is you have a much wider selection of ideas that come through there. This is really just for your hero, like where you'll use that when you get into the listing images and sell the actual gallery images that are converting that. That's the approach that we were kind of talking about before.

**Drew** (00:12:50) - But for those heroes, then it just comes down to experimentation. But I've heard a lot of people say like, little, tiny changes will make really big impacts on click through rate. And that's true. our approach is really to kind of look for things that will be like legitimate, game changing ideas that will really set your product apart on those search results. Sometimes we don't have really good ideas, to be honest with you. Like it's challenging if you're selling like a refrigerator. Like. Like where? Like how well you can tilt it. I mean, maybe you'll open it. we did come up with one idea where it was like, leave it open and put text inside the refrigerator, you know, digitally. that would catch some attention. You could put like, a fun message in there, but there's creative ideas that exist. And if you're working with, you know, your own products, go look at adjacent markets that are similar to yours. And also, don't even look at Amazon. Go look at websites and go look at Google.

**Josh** (00:13:33) - Yeah, that's a really good idea, I think I think that is a brilliant hack. And I think I mean; it's not it's not rocket science by any means. You're just saying like go look at adjacent markets. But so many people just get so honed in on one thing. They're just focused on, hey, I am selling a shoe, so I need to be better than just my shoe. Competitors. What's the best shoe competitor doing? Yeah, how can I do that? Right. And it's no go to think outside the box. So, I love that Drew. And I love the idea even with the refrigerator. Like just sparking some ideas there or like leaving the door open, put some messaging on the inside like this is an area on Amazon. Yes, there's their terms of service and stuff like that. This is an envelope that you could push all day long on Amazon. And like if they don't want that image, they'll just say sorry. It's a different one.

**Josh** (00:14:16) - And we.

**Drew** (00:14:16) - Coach clients through that process because they'll bring it up. They're like, well I'm a little nervous about terms of service and I don't want my listening to go down. Be prepared. You know, like just be ready for it to go down and have, you know, a quick like it went down. We think it's because of the listing. Go. You can read what the issue is from Amazon. And then just go re-upload your images and have it primed so you can, you know, reverse it. So yeah.

**Josh** (00:14:35) - 100% awesome. Drew on that note for the main image, how do you test whether the new main image that you're testing is better, right. Is it, are you measuring like, hey, here's two weeks running ads with one main image and what is my CTR? And then do you take another two weeks and run another main image and just look at the ad CTR, or are you using other tools? Obviously, you've probably used pig fu and all that stuff to get to this point, but I've seen times where even picking fewer in Tel Aviv, what the Amazon customer wants is still different than what in Tel Aviv pointed out.

**Josh** (00:15:08) - And it's like at the end of the day, the Amazon customers are voting with their money. In Tel Aviv, customers are just voting because they get paid money to school, right?

**Drew** (00:15:15) - Yeah. You're right, I think I think in Tel Aviv in the picture. You only so far, right. Yeah. If you're mostly like it's really good about debating which one you want to try for a second or third. Yeah. Or groups of images that you want to put into a testing regimen. But, you know, it's like if you and our business partners and we kind of disagree about like, what's the right approach for the Hero pick fund and Tel Aviv can help us, you know, complete that debate. if you've really got radical designs you want to test out, pick food, and Tel Aviv can help you dial in like, yeah, that's too radical or no, it's radical. And let's put it into the test regimen. But, no, we use that data and we do a time based, just like you said, because we need to be able to actually test it with real customers.

**Drew** (00:15:46) - Because to your point, the results that come out of any one of these testing platforms, they can tell if you're pick food, those aren't always the best ones. and then the other thing is, is like, we're not putting dumb stuff up there, right? We're not putting random shit up in front of Amazon. Most of the recommendations are coming from, you know, experience and their best practices. And so, what you're testing is a best practice. You're not testing any old idea. You're testing. A set of images, one if it's the hero or the gallery images, you're testing them after kind of being thoughtful and data driven in the first place. And we would never put something up there that we thought might do the opposite. Like that would lower click through rate or conversion rate. We're only putting things out there that we think have a likelihood of improvement and low risk of, you know, doing anything negative to the account. I'll tell you, we've never had anybody's account tank because of any changes that we made.

**Drew** (00:16:29) - Sometimes we don't have the performance that we're looking for, right? That we're hoping for that when we get it. But we still, you know, don't have things tank because of the way that we approach that.

**Josh** (00:16:38) - Awesome. Drew, this is, this has been I've already written down some golden nuggets here, so this has been fantastic already. All right. So, let's assume, okay, you've gone in, you've gone through your four-part process that you talked about in terms of optimization. We've got our main images, our regular images, our secondary images dialed in. Now what are some of the other strategies you've been implementing?

**Drew** (00:16:58) - Yeah. So, I mean all of this is kind of like part of that like a detailed audit. We'll be looking at things. We'll start with those root words. We're kind of focused in. Like there usually ends up being a medium tail is what we tend to focus on that includes root relevance. And then we're looking at performance and seeing like you know, how does this product perform within that, that bucket.

**Drew** (00:17:12) - Then we'll launch one of those plans to kind of do an assessment and make recommendations on the listing. That's got a long lead time. Those things can take you know, fastest would be like 4 to 6 weeks. They usually take eight weeks with completing the report and getting people aligned and making the decisions, and then building the creatives so that that might get started. And then in the meantime, we're doing the boring part, which I was referring to, and I say that jokingly because it's not that boring. It's really important, but the optimizations. So most what we grew up right when we first grew up in Amazon, like through Inner Circle and everything, you know, we were kind of taught about this cascading system where you have a funnel, a traditional funnel system where you do your research, you get your exacts, your phrases, and then you set up some models and some broad and you start harvesting and there's a whole, you know, process around negative matching and performance tracking. And it's all numeric.

**Drew** (00:17:52) - It's all rules based. And there's nothing wrong with that. We do this by the way, but we do not lead with that. That is not our initial way of managing an account. We do a relevancy first approach. So, it's all similar, like what we just talked about with the snorkel mask. Once we've identified all of the right products that we feel like are our competitors. And again, you can change that scope. It could be the full-face, full-face snorkel mask. It could be all snorkel masks, maybe the more traditional type in this new style, or it could be just the old ones. But once we kind of start with that really refined list, we then go do all of the research on the keywords, which, you know, if anyone is from the inner circle, they'll know this method is the MKL. And if we follow the same methodology, but we kind of put a little bit on steroids because we're very relevancy focused. And if we have advertising data, we can actually, with quite a bit of precision, identify all those relevant words, even for really niche products that have a lot of synonyms associated with their products.

**Drew** (00:18:41) - So once we have this, we have a list of relevant competitors. We kind of understand the relevant root patterns in the search term that we kind of need to be looking for. We then reverse engineer all the keywords from the competitors and we set some basic filters. This is the MKL process. We set some basic filters. We're like, we only want to look at keywords that are on page one. We only want to look at keywords where four of the highly relevant competitors, where at least four of them are on page one. Right. And maybe we could be more restrictive and say six, if you wanted to be more refined for a product launch, you might do that. now you've got to set a keyword that is on page one. Your sellers are making, your competition's making money off of it, and we've applied relevance to it. The list is super fucking clean, like it's so clean. But we go further that that kind of rounds out the typical MKL kind of output. But what we also do is we bump it up against your campaigns.

**Drew** (00:19:23) - So if you've got an existing product that's, you know, it's been doing great, maybe it's kind of like slowing down. You think there's room for additional keyword coverage. We actually will spit out research based on your ad campaigns. We'll go find and reconcile the research to what's already in your campaign and only add the new stuff. So, when you compare this, what we call the relevancy first system to the traditional funnel system, our process takes a week. The traditional funnel system will take months. Ours is fast and accurate because it actually is so focused on relevancy. We're only adding in things that we have low risk, high probability of actually resulting in a real conversion. Right? All of this is not good, because if you have junk in your account with a traditional funnel system, what happens to your product level conversion rate? If you have a lot of clicks into orders, it goes down. So, all of a sudden, if you follow the traditional funnel system, which everyone thinks is like the best thing in the world, the reality is, if it slows you down, it pulls your conversion rate down.

**Drew** (00:20:10) - So if you don't do the work to go find the research and get the keywords right, you're going to continuously kind of like always be holding back a little bit on that conversion rate. And that's going to affect your organic rank across your entire account.

**Josh** (00:20:19) - Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. I mean it's very basic and it's very elementary that we think about this. Right. and I'm going to double down a little bit further on this room. So, we do a similar approach. Right. Because I followed Brandon Young to the master keyword list, the MKL method that you're talking about, okay, we do this, but what we do is we break things down into four different buckets of keywords. Okay, I'm talking so I, I literally have a team member that goes through this list, and we'll do the following. Okay. So, you talked about how, you know there's like a relevancy component to it where it's like how many of these ten competitors, if we pulled ten competitors, how many of them are ranked on page one for this keyword? Right.

**Josh** (00:20:57) - What we do is a little bit different because we don't assume our competition knows what the heck they're doing. Okay, so we are going to go keyword by keyword. And we're going to think, does this keyword make sense from a normal person's point of view right? Then we are going to literally enter it into Amazon. Okay. And then we are going to see what comes up on Amazon okay. And we're going to go keyword by keyword. Sometimes there's a couple thousand keywords. So can this be tedious. Yes. But have somebody on your team do this for you okay. We're going to go keyword by. You.

**Drew** (00:21:23) - Don't do it yourself. Yeah.

**Josh** (00:21:24) - Don't do this yourself. Number one worth.

**Drew** (00:21:26) - In the show.

**Josh** (00:21:27) - So worth it. you're going to go keyword by keyword. So, in the snorkel, face mask that you were talking about, okay I'm going to have four different categories of keywords. I'll list them off right now. Shop semi shop okay. Then we browse specific and then browse okay.

**Josh** (00:21:42) - So let me talk about what a shop keyword is. A shop keyword means if I'm searching for a snorkel face mask, I want to see 90% of the competitors that show up on page number one are going to be the exact same as competitors, they could be called substitutes, right? Like they are, they are competitors. We are all competing. We offer a very similar product okay. That's a shop keyword. Those are the keywords that we're going to light up with our advertising as soon as we launch the product, because we're going to say only super specific, only highly relevant. We're going to go double down on the shop keywords, where again, the Amazon's already ranked a bunch of these products for this keyword. Okay, semi shop keywords. What are these semi keywords are going to be where you have again maybe 75% of page number one are these snorkel face masks. And you may have some snorkel fin gear that slips in there. You may have some regular goggles that slip into that keyword.

**Josh** (00:22:36) - I'm not sure. Like maybe you're just like the ocean. Ocean, snorkeling gear, right? Might be that keyword, right? Where it's like, okay, it's relevant, but we're calling this a semi shop keyword because only 75% are like competitors. Then we go down to a specific, browse specific means. All right, 50% okay. We've got 50%. It's half and half. Maybe half of the search results are the old traditional snorkel. It doesn't actually have the face mask okay. Maybe it's 5050. Then we go down to browse. This is going to be 25% or less, which means you're dealing with literally like a handful of competitors are showing up on this page. One for this keyword. Right. This may be, cruise cruising, essentials cruising must haves. Right. It's like, okay, well, if you go on a cruise, you may be snorkeling. Maybe some people consider that an essential. And maybe you have 3 or 4 of your competitors that have ranked for that keyword.

**Josh** (00:23:31) - Now that's great, but we consider that a browse keyword where it's like, yeah, good luck. great if you get there. But that's not where I'm going to start with my advertising traffic. So, I'd be interested to hear your feedback on my process of our relevancy ranking.

**Drew** (00:23:44) - Yeah, we do the same thing. We've got a different language for it. And I think the difference in the language I was thinking about this is like, you know, ours isn't pulled up. We train on this. So, because we talk about it internally like you do, we've got discovery, transactional, branded. Then we have seasonal and quality focused features like best you know the best. So like discovery keywords would be like coffee maker. You don't know what you're looking for. You know what you're looking for. But you didn't describe it in the search bar, right? You just didn't take the time to think through like that long tail search. As you see the search results, you refine it and then you go, okay, well, I actually want a drip coffee maker.

**Drew** (00:24:13) - And then it dawns and he's like, oh, you know what? I really liked the one I had in college. It was a Black and Decker. So, you won't do the Black and Decker drip coffee maker. So, we just moved through discovery transactional and branded. But then maybe it's a feature, maybe it's a drip coffee maker with a grinder. Right. So now you're getting really specific in that each of those are going to require sort of different strategies based on honestly like what your competition is doing to your point, like short tail discovery keywords. They're expensive. They don't have the same conversion rate. They're really competitive. You put a lot of ad spin in there, because you need to be able to rank and get the knock-on effect associated with them, but it's those transactional ones and the like, longer tail feature-based ones that become really important for us to focus on. That's where we when we're doing diagnostics on an account, that's where we're really laser focused. Then it becomes sort of a strategic choice on how you want to use the ad spin to go after some of those discovery keywords, make a case-by-case basis.

**Drew** (00:24:56) - It's product level. It's not even account level. It's product level.

**Josh** (00:24:59) - So I guess walk me through that. Let's say let's say you're launching a new product, right? You've got this keyword list. You've now filtered it through for relevancy. How are you going to light this up? What keywords do you target first and why? And how do you scale up from there?

**Drew** (00:25:10) - Yeah, we've got a whole framework for it. We actually presented at EMC innovate on this and we did a can become two. but we have a whole launch framework. And basically, what we're doing is we're moving through a set of stages. And I've got a nice visual for this, but we won't show it here. But basically, like in the first couple of weeks, you're going to be really focused on exact and phrase. And then as you go through time, you're going to start rolling out more and more campaigns in both exact and phrase. Our exact campaigns tend to be, I don't know, anywhere in the 10 to 20.

**Drew** (00:25:32) - It could be more, but 10 to 20 range. And then the phrase campaigns will have like three targets. That's it. And the reason is, is because we're doing like medium tail long tail phrases. We're not trying to go broad and collect data and try to get an understanding about what Amazon thinks. We've already done all that homework with that relevancy first approach. So, by doing that, then this framework just funnels the ad spend in and around the things that we know are relevant. Because we looked at your competitors, the competitors are just like yours. We did all the research and then we started expanding from there. One of the things that we do also is like an auto low bid for the launch, and we'll just get that going right away because they have such a long lead time for getting going, but they're a nice little bit. What's that?

**Josh** (00:26:07) - How low is the bid for.

**Drew** (00:26:09) - It can be really low, it can get a little subjective, but if you want to rule, it's probably 20% of your baseline bid for your product, right? So, if you're going to do a $2 bid, you'll probably be like $0.40.

**Drew** (00:26:17) - If I'm doing my math right, you might want to go a little lower. it depends on how conservative you are with your ad spend. Yeah. You can go lower and then just watch the campaign every week and see if you're getting impressions. And if you're not, raise it a couple of pennies, you know, and then just kind of incrementally like go through the motions. Those end up. They're not huge. But those are like a nice little trick that generates good keywords and then also can be like a really good ecosystem. So that's kind of the general framework. I mean, we do more than that. You know, we still implement broad campaigns and things like that. But those tend to be like broad modifiers. They tend to be really dialed in. Right. What we're not doing is casting a wide net, using Amazon's, you know, advertising campaign tools. Because what we find is that it ends up being wasteful and everything's really, really expensive to begin with in the first place.

**Drew** (00:26:53) - So just get laser focused right out of the gate and then start experimenting. Exploring like once you've kind of got yourself established.

**Josh** (00:26:59) - I love that, drew. This has been fantastic. You've already dropped a lot of knowledge that I think our listeners can actually implement. I'm curious, can you give us, you know, can you give me over the next three minutes, give me some like case studies of brands when they started working with you, what did you do and what results did they achieve and why? What were some of the tactics that helped you get them to where they are now?

**Drew** (00:27:21) - Gosh, yeah. I mean, we've got some really interesting case studies and I'll highlight this one, but I won't go into the details. We had a seller that went from being a seller central to vendor and then back to Seller Central over 18 months. And that was like crazy. We learned so much from that. But maintaining stability, they had assets being sold on both platforms within Amazon, both through vendor and through seller get buy box issues and all these things that we had to manage.

**Drew** (00:27:42) - That one was really interesting because it was the level of complexity and what our team was able to do with the reporting platform that we've got. Because we were able to blend data, we're able to blend across all those accounts and see kind of like what was going on, and then make more informed decisions about how to balance between those two for each of the transitions, which they did. Two transitions. but, you know, yeah, we've got, you know, we've got some case studies where like, you know, in health and wellness, you know, we took we had a client in, this looks like a six-month period that we decreased their tacos by 20%, increase their sales by ten, which is pretty typical. Wow. You know, the thing is, is, like, people hear these numbers, and I'm like, there's no way that that's possible. But it is. And when you get into the details, you can have a lot of wasted time. That's kind of like that.

**Drew** (00:28:17) - You just accept, right? For us, when we see wasted spin for unbranded only, like really dialed in on sponsor products and we see ways to spend above 20%, that's a red flag that's not being managed well. And I think where most people spend their time focusing is on, well, my wasted 10,000 bucks. I can probably carve back 2000 a month on that right to get it down. But the reality is that's $2,000 in clicks that were killing your conversion rate. And so once you kind of get these things under control, Amazon's like, okay, this is a high performing product on Amazon. And if you can clean up some of the underlying data that's driving their metrics like wasted spend, you start seeing long tail or longer term performance metrics really start to take off. Your organic rank becomes more stable. So that's how some of these numbers come about because it's just focused on the fundamentals by, you know, updating product listings and like just doing the basics really well. Focus on relevancy.

**Drew** (00:29:03) - we had oh. This is a really good client for us. We had worked with an oral supplements company that does like a really niche kind of toothpaste. They have a whole set of product lines, but two phases, they're number one. We were able to come in and we reduced their tacos by 36%. They're single digit tacos at this point, right. And then their sales have gone up 100%. Now the sales are going up in part because of the work that we do. But also keep in mind that, like these clients are launching products at the same time, right? So their sales are going up because of that. But if you have a stable taco and you're growing sales, I don't care how you're getting there. You know, it's evidence that that's a highly performing product and that the execution on the marketing side is being done in a good way. when we do launches, you know, our goal is to. It used to be good to break even in profitability in the first six months for brand new product lines, not variations.

**Drew** (00:29:44) - and now it's starting to shift a lot depending on the category you're in. But we launched a product that had, or we basically helped a brand launch a set of product lines in the pet supplement space. And, you know, these are pretty unheard-of numbers, but we were able to get their tacos down from 36 or down 36% while we grew their sales, literally 300%. So, just a lot of mechanics involved in being able to execute stuff at that level. So those are just three kinds of examples there, Josh. Yeah.

**Josh** (00:30:09) - I love it. Drew. Those are amazing numbers. So, I guess if you were to sum it all up, I mean, does it go back to the basics that we already just talked about? I mean, is that like or were you doing anything different like, oh, I want to explode by 1%.

**Drew** (00:30:21) - We're doing advanced stuff like, you know, I mean, we're pretty big on like getting creatives correct and aligned, getting headlines mapped around, like if you're doing a sponsored brand campaign that you're going to be matching, you know, those advertisements with the keyword and the intent, right? The different categories that you mentioned, you want to make sure you have those things, kind of all lined up so that you're being more effective and resonating with the shopper.

**Drew** (00:30:38) - All of those things that we do, but, you know, the listing assessments and sort of like this optimization piece, we focus on that because like, generally speaking, like that's the first place to come into. And once we get that working, everything else becomes easier. If you've got a distressed business and you're, you know, your tacos are at 20% or 22%, you're not going to want to take the chances and spend on sponsor brand or, you know, or you're going to hear me advocate for that when you've got, you know, a pretty challenging profit margin. And I'm advocating for sponsor brands, it's like, no, let's go get your profit margin under control. And then when we get the confidence that your accounts are kind of being optimized correctly, then let's go to the next order of advertising type. So, sponsor products, sponsor brands, sponsor displays, even DSP. We have clients that will come to us and ask us like, hey, we do DSP, we're like, yep, we do it.

**Drew** (00:31:21) - And then we start working with them and we find low hanging fruit and sponsor products. So, we're not going to go spend, you know, $10,000 a month on DSP when we've got low hanging fruit on the rest of the catalog that we can just go get conversions. There's no reason to justify that. Yeah.

**Josh** (00:31:33) - Love that.

**Drew** (00:31:34) - Yeah, it's a boring answer. If people are like, wait, it's back to the basics again.

**Josh** (00:31:37) - It is. But I think that's the encouraging thing that I hear out of all of this, is that, look, everybody always likes to pitch these hacks and tips and strategies. And I found this black hat tactic that's doing XYZ and it's going to explode things. And it's like, look guys, if you just boil it back down to the basics, you heard it rattle off some amazing numbers, 300% growth reduction in tacos by 20%, right? Like massive changes overnight to somebody's profitability and growth in their business by just focusing on the basics, which frankly speaking, I think most of us are as entrepreneurs, we want to run so quick.

**Josh** (00:32:11) - We've already got that new product idea on our minds. We want something new and shiny to work on. Not this boring. Like, I don't want to go sift through keywords I don't. I already know I need a good main image. Just, just give me something, right? Like. But if you slow down and you take that approach, you can see some magical stuff happen. So, Drew, as we wrap up this episode, I've got three actionable takeaways that I've noted. You let me know if I'm missing something here. Number one, it all comes down to relevancy, and I think you provided a lot of great examples. I shared my four buckets of keywords that we categorize keywords into, and then we have different strategies that we employ PPC wise for each of those different keyword buckets. And you also heard drew. Drew has different, I guess, titles that he'll classify these keywords into in different buckets. But he has actionable strategies and he shared those with you. So here would be my actionable takeaway.

**Josh** (00:32:58) - If this sounds foreign to you, and you don't have a similar process that you are going through in methodically saying this keyword, like what? How are we going to treat this keyword? Is it a browser type of keyword where there's not a lot of buyer intent? It's more discovery based. Then you need to have an actionable strategy for your PPC based on that knowledge. Now, and I would argue, most of us just download the Cerebro report from helium ten. They're like, well, they're selling on page one for this. So, light these ads up. Right. False. And that's where I think people get caught up. And so, step number one, dive into the relevancy of the keywords that you're focused on. action item number two focuses on that main image as well as those secondary images. So Drew talked about this. He provided some great ideas and tips. Number one being for that main image. Yes, you should use pig fu. We're in Tel Aviv for product opinion, all of those testing softwares.

**Josh** (00:33:47) - That's fine, but get three, 4 or 5 different main images and then have a testing sequence that you're going to use and say, all right, during week one we're testing this main image. Let's see what our CTR is on our ads during week two. It's this main image. Let's see what our CTR is. And then at the end of the day let the Amazon customers decide because they're the ones actually voting with their money to decide, hey, which product do they actually want rather than product opinion? But I love that you said this is not a quick win. This is not what I thought about this, I designed it, and 24 hours later we're off to the races. You said that this is like 6 to 8 weeks, if not sometimes longer if you want to collect more data. and so that's an important thing I think, for our listeners to understand is like when you get to the basics of optimization, this is not a hey, by next week, things are going to be rocking and rolling.

**Josh** (00:34:31) - You need to plan this thing out. It's like we're going to take the next quarter and we're going to make it. Optimizations. And then if we can maximize that CTR and then the CVR based off of that, then we will have a lot of long-term success for this product. And then my third actionable strategy here, Dru, is scaling up your ad campaigns, as you continue to generate sales. Okay. So, changing your kind of frame of reference from those old courses that people may have heard of that filtering process, start with really high auto bids and browse keywords and then negate keywords, and then add them into these exact campaigns. Instead, launch with the exact campaigns right out of the gate based on those transactional level relevant keywords for your business, and then experience the 300% growth and 20% reduction in tacos. And if that doesn't happen, don't tell me. Go to Drew and say, Drew, what happened? You promised all these reports.

**Drew** (00:35:20) - Yeah, those 300% examples, they're real. But then I know that they're they're, they're extreme.

**Drew** (00:35:25) - But I mean, real growth is out there. That's the message.

**Josh** (00:35:28) - Drew. Did I miss anything?

**Drew** (00:35:29) - You know, that's a really good synopsis, man. The one thing that I would share that has been kind of an undertone theme here is like when you're an entrepreneur, it's difficult to understand, like what the metrics are that you're looking at. And we define KPI, which is what everyone knows, like your tacos or echoes or whatever. Maybe it's sales growth or whatever. You're maybe two units sold, maybe it's BSR, but you need to understand the k-p-d and that's the key performance driver that underlies that KPI. So if you're going for tacos, you need to understand conversion rate for medium tail, highly relevant search terms. You won't get your tacos unless you understand the KPD around what drives it, which is going to be a conversion rate. And if you don't have an idea around like what you're looking at in terms of the data, you're either looking at noise or you're looking at data that's got noise, or you're looking at data that's that's actually factual, and that's what you want to get to as a seller.

**Drew** (00:36:11) - And regardless of who's managing your PPC, you want to challenge that team that's working on your marketing to think that way and to come to you with answers and explain it to you. You're a seller. You're it's not your job to get in the weeds of Amazon PPC. We do it because it's a necessity of survival. But when you start to scale your business, you're going to need to step away from those things. And you need to know that people are looking at the data the right way and feeding you the information in the right way.

**Josh** (00:36:31) - Yeah. Drew. Excellent. Excellent words of wisdom. So on that note, Drew, here are my three questions I ask each guest. So starting off with number one, what's been the most influential book that you've read and why?

**Drew** (00:36:42) - Yeah, I think I was corporate for a long time. And then Tim Ferriss came out with the four hour workweek, and I heard a buddy of mine mentioned that to you. That was a game changer for me, because I was basically doing like, what I was taught from all of the other old heads that were in, you know, the corporate office on, like, how to Manage my time.

**Drew** (00:36:56) - And the four hour workweek started to really open up this idea of, like, I'm in control of my time. And once I started doing that, lo and behold, I had a lot more time so I could start exploring other things. And I still use those techniques today.

**Josh** (00:37:06) - That's awesome. That is a great book. And I think a lot of us, I think a lot of us go back to that book of like, oh, it's this freedom of time and space, so it's great. drew, question number two here. What is your favorite productivity tool or software tool that you think is a game changer?

**Drew** (00:37:20) - GPT its large language models. Yeah.

**Josh** (00:37:23) - and as and as I prefaced you before, if you say ChatGPT, now you have to give me specifics.

**Drew** (00:37:27) - I know everyone likes the same answer every time.

**Josh** (00:37:29) - Yeah, I love it. Yeah.

**Drew** (00:37:31) - Yeah. We're using ChatGPT and some really creative ways. So internally for me, well, I'll frame these for the seller. We have our own set of tools that we use for our own marketing.

**Drew** (00:37:40) - Like a vacuum. We have our own marketing and sales bots. One of the challenges that came up is you've got to like ChatGPT sucks, because what it does is it provides you an answer based on an average, unless you give it context, like people are familiar with these role based things. Like, I want you to be an expert lawyer in contract law so that you can build out a service contract for a partner. Right. So okay. Yeah, that's great. But what, you know, like based on US law, what kind of a service, what kind of a partnership is it? You can get pretty detailed to give it context. Once you do that, ChatGPT is really damn good. So what we've been working on, and one of the things that we've been looking to solve is voice and tone. Because when you start interacting with ChatGPT like you've seen, these people will copy and paste, you know, like a message that's clearly come from some AI bot. And they put it in the email and you're like, what's this person all of a sudden using the word endeavor and meticulously and you know, these like five letter words that they've never used before? Nobody speaks like that.

**Drew** (00:38:29) - So we've been working on building out voice and tone. And the reason is, is because the user experience. Now, when our team is starting to interact with ChatGPT, it feels more human like. And so we went further. Once we kind of figured that out, we then started making bots that make bots so prompt engineers as a bot. So now what our team can do is they can come in and they've got a script for this now. But if you want to, if you want to handle like your customer inquiries and you've got a specific voice in tone for your brand, we can actually program all that into the bot and it comes out with like really, really, really good content. we're using it now to produce marketing content. We're using it because we have all the ideas in like what we want to do, but then the real work comes into wordsmithing and getting it polished. There's nothing wrong with that. We would hire somebody to go do all that extra work. The business is designing all of the content, and then when we want to put the spit and polish on it, we use ChatGPT to do that.

**Drew** (00:39:13) - And I would challenge anybody to, to suggest that our content is even generated by a bot versus a human. You wouldn't know. Yeah. so that's it. And then we've got a bunch of analytical tools which are kind of boring, but we use them for product listing assessments, like if we're gonna go look at shopper reviews, we've got a human process on the front end and a human process on the back end, because you can't just dump reviews in. If you dump, it's garbage in, garbage out. So if you dump all these reviews in and you don't scrub the data for what you're looking for, ChatGPT is going to give you an answer regardless. Like it's always going to give you an answer. It's just whether or not the answer is going to be good or not. And so we've designed tools that understand kind of like what we expect out of ChatGPT, and then those tools then meet its expectations. And so the outputs are a lot better.

**Josh** (00:39:51) - I love that. Yeah true.

**Josh** (00:39:52) - This is excellent. We may need to have a whole podcast episode just on the ChatGPT and your use cases of it.

**Drew** (00:39:58) - I want to put together a class on prompt engineering for Amazon sellers. So if you ever want to talk more about that, let me know. Yeah.

**Josh** (00:40:04) - I like that idea, drew. I think, let's do, I think that would be an amazing episode that we could dive into. So, Drew, final question: who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

**Drew** (00:40:16) - Yeah, we talked about this before the call. I mean, you know, I'm always listening to Leron. I'm always listening to Danny McMillan. I'm always listening to Brandon and you, Kevin King. Those are all of the main ones that kind of come top, top of mind. But the ones that I'm really focused on right now are because, you know, AI is such a big deal, real AI, LLMs, not the, you know, someone putting it on their website that their software is AI.

**Drew** (00:40:36) - there's a subscription called The sequence, which is incredibly good. It's technical, but it's also still approachable, and it's really starting to provide me with insights on where this is really going, in a much more meaningful way, because, you know, these AI models, whether it's cloud or ChatGPT or whatever it is that you're using, they're going to be very, very different in six months from now, and in two years from now and in five years from now. And so I'm trying to stay on top of those things, because they are going to absolutely change everything that we do digitally.

**Josh** (00:41:00) - I agree, I agree. Drew amazing information. Now if people want to follow you, they want to reach out to you. They want to learn more about your agency services or even get an audit. Where can people learn more?

**Drew** (00:41:09) - Yeah, you can email me directly, Drew at ThinkVinculum.Com. The spelling is a little funky for most people, but it's V-I-N-C-U-L-U-M. so you can do that, or you can go to our website and we've got a link right at the top.

**Drew** (00:41:21) - You can just schedule a call. It'll book a time directly with me.

**Josh** (00:41:23) - Awesome. And we'll include links in the show notes for people to make it easy as well. Yeah.

**Drew** (00:41:27) - And we offer free audits for sellers. And they're not bullshit audits. They're not. They're not the vanity audits of telling you how much money you're spending on sponsored products. We break it all down. and we do it to do two things. One, we want to prove our level of expertise. And then you may not want to work with us right now, which is fine, but you kind of want to, you know, get some insights to make your team better or your current agency better. Do it. Bring them to the meeting. have them come, and then we'll break down your account and give you real, actionable strategies to boost it.

**Josh** (00:41:51) - Love it. Love it. Well, drew. Thanks again for your time today, and listeners should be looking forward to part two. Drew, we're going to make that happen.

**Josh** (00:41:58) - Yeah.

**Drew** (00:41:58) - Cool. Awesome, man. I look forward to that.