May 16
How to choose the right Amazon PPC expert
As an Amazon seller you have to manage a lot of things.
Listings pictures, bullet points, content, keywords research and ranking. Pay-Per-Clicks ads campaign and keywords in addition with all it takes to run a business.
Multi-tasking is important at first. It makes you understand each part of your business. But it should be a time to delegate some parts of it to the right persons.
Selling on Amazon is all about ranking on as many keywords that have as high search volumes as possible.
The better you rank, the lower you will have to spend on ads to get sales.
The more you sell, the better you rank. And the best way to get those sales is with Amazon PPC Ads.
Delegating your PPC management is a serious matter !
Your business growth on Amazon might depend on you doing the right choice when it comes to delegate Amazon Ads.
Agencies
Agencies are one of the most obvious solution that comes in mind.
They have experiences working with multiple kind of companies, and multiple experts, more or less dedicated to fixed clients.
They seem like the perfect solution but you need to pay attention and make sure:
- They are really agencies. Not a solo freelancer selling himself as an agency. The main pro of an agency is to be able to recruit experts to match their clients needs.
- You will have a dedicated long term expert. Your business, niche and ambition needs to be perfectly understood. Nothing worse than working with changing experts that doesn’t follow your business evolution over long term.
One good question to ask is how many clients are they working with then how many experts do they have.
You can also check their linkedIn company page to see who are those experts. Since how long have they been working with the agency etc.
This option if often the most expensive one though. On average, the agencies I had contacted charges around $1500 for managing PPCs (5 SKU selling in 6 countries).
You can find a list of more than a thousand agencies, with quotes, here.
Automation
If you are short on budget you might consider to continue managing your PPC yourself but save time using a PPC Automation tool.
Managing PPC involve adjusting your bids, daily checking your campaigns to see what performs and what to improve, putting too expensive keywords in negative, performing keywords in “exact” mode. It might involve hourly adjusting your bids so you spend on time that sells the best (day-parting).
All of that can be done by a PPC automation tool. There are more and more such tools like: AiHello, M19, Adtomic, Pacvue, Pertutua etc…
I recently found this very complete and interesting review of 47 tools !
The pricing goes from $49 to +$1000 / month depending on your ad spend.
Just keep in mind that a PPC tool will never replace a human analysis and view.
Amazon is changing fast. Just a few months ago it was not possible to advertise outside amazon (DSP). Lot of new possibilities comes, best strategies are constantly changing as the marketplace changes.
Using an automation tool won’t replace an expert eye.
Freelancer
Probably the best solution to have a personalize following. Like for agencies, you will need to find someone who listen well to understand:
- Your niche / market
- Where you are right now and what you are struggling on
- Your mid and long term goals
You can find freelancers on Upwork or Fiverr.
They are thousands in those platforms. Most of them are coming from Asia, especially from Pakistan. That is because the Amazon ecosystem is well developed there. There is some huge training organisations in Pakistan, that’s train thousand Amazon experts each year. Enablers is one of them, the biggest one actually.
While those training are mostly very complete, don’t forget that experience is also very important. Investing on an experience expert that has worked in the same market as yours will be more profitable than a freshly certified one without experience.
Most PPC experts from Pakistan won’t tell you the name of their client due to privacy term, that’s ok. That said, you must insist on getting real example from previous experience. How they manage to lower ads acquisition cost (ACOS), how long it takes to improve ranking on competitive keywords, what was the average monthly revenue and evolution of previous clients.
You will recognize the best experts as:
- They won’t promise short term results. They know that even applying the best methods cannot guarantee good results.
- They might even question your product quality and pricing. Putting all efforts on a bad product won’t make it succeed. Same for a bad pricing.
- They will talk about strategy, experienced based, with examples, not only theory.
- They will ask for your product cost, help you define your target ACOS and goals.
- They will report to you each week. Daily reports are often not relevant, monthly not granular enough.
How do I know that ?
During the past 2 months, I arranged more than 300 video meeting with Amazon experts, mostly from Pakistan.
At first it was trying to discover if there is a need that I can solve with a tool I was building (datamz).
I finally learnt a lot.
I sourced them on Upwork, Fiverr and Facebook Groups.
More than 20% of them missed the meeting. Some with excuses but anyway that’s not a good sign to start a business relation.
For half of those I had online, it was impossible to guarantee they had a previous experience. Their answers seemed only theoretical.
But I also had the chance to meet great people ! Passionate experts ! One of them was young and very passionate, pragmatic and shared very interesting experiences with PPC strategies.
Another works with his mom ! They both have two complementary approach for their clients. I also talked with experts that are also sellers of their own product. I learnt about PPC strategies, client relationship and how some experts manage to completely boost multiply by 5 their clients sales just by changing the listings and keyword targeting so they can sell the benefits instead of the product itself.
Some facts were difficult to believe to be honest. But as I had already developed and analytic tool that connects to Amazon, some experts were okay to create a public profile and connect their account to get analytics and public certified portfolio.
Abdullah Imran for example was one of those who impressed me the most with his knowledge and experience. He create a public certified portfolio on datamz.
That is how I came up with a new solution for helping the 112 users of datamz (151 today): What if instead of building another analytics and PPC automation tool I try to connect each seller that struggle with PPC to an expert I had selected and interviewed ? The tool will then be used to ease relation between them, ease audit, ease setting target and getting automatic certified reporting each week.
I talked with 5 users (Amazon sellers, 3 in EU, 2 selling in US) that agreed and are now working with two of the best experts I have met !
That is how I can help you now. Help you to choose the right Amazon PPC expert who will help you growing your business on Amazon. And provide you with a tool that makes your collaboration easy, transparent and trustful.
Let me know if you want to know more !
I would be happy to discuss about your Amazon business !
