This Episode, #31, was prompted by our very own Facebook members! They said in a survey that Amazon Ads were the area they most wanted expert help with. Danny McMillan responded by giving many golden nuggets to our listeners.

This is the first of two episodes containing this interview.

SHOW NOTES FOR EPISODE #31

WHERE TO CATCH DANNY

Doing a presentation in Hong Kong after the Canton Fair. 

Www.dannymcmillan.com

To connect with Danny, click on these links:

 Linkedin;

Twitter: @dannymac1000 

Facebook: Facebook

Danny's background 

Had been looking at eBay. 

Realised Amazon FBA had everything he wanted in a business. 

Radio show on Kiss FM for 2 years at the turn of the noughties. 

Ran own record labels late '90s/early 2000s. Creating an Amazon business has many similarities including working in a team.

In 2008, left music biz. Become MD of a tech startup for 2 years. Shut down in 2010 after £500K in investment. 

2012 head of digital at a ticketing company which had an exit. He used PPC to increase business and gain investor confidence. 

Danny's specialist skills that he brings to  Amazon:

On page optimisation and SEO for ASIN

PPC/Amazon ads

Import/Export processes 

Why Amazon? 

You can bootstrap but it is easily scalable. 

In most start up companies; it's about how fast you can resolve the customer's problem before you run out of investor cash. This is a lot easier to do with just one web page (such as an Amazon product listing) and building out scale from there

There are various specialist roles in an amazon business. Danny was attracted to the marketing and SEO/Adwords side. 

Why are Amazon ads important?

Instant visibility esp when you have no sales history, no conversion history. 

It also helps ranking on Amazon for organic sales as a conversion history is built. 

Common issues

A lot of people do something like:

Run an auto campaign 

Give up on that

Run manual campaign 

Tweak something every day in an unstructured way. 

Then they are basically lost! 

You need a clear strategy. 

LINKS TO DANNY'S SPREADSHEETS: click here

SEE DANNY'S DETAILED NOTES HERE

DANNY's RECOMMENDED SIMPLEST ACTION SUMMARY:

Week 1. 

Create first auto campaign. 

End week 1: Cut and paste keywords into Amazon and check for relevance ;add negative exact keywords to the campaign that don’t fit your product criteria. 

If needed, tweak product page (title and back end keywords) but be mindful that wholesale changes can / will affect rankings

Week 2: 

add second auto campaign with higher bids

Week 3: 

create a bridge to manual campaign. 

Weeks 4+:

Use 3rd party tools to gradually add keywords:

DETAILS ON SETTING UP AMAZON ADS

WEEK ONE

Set up your first auto campaign. Aim: tuning or validating your listing and showing your listing to Amazon. 

Guidelines: £10 a day budget, 40 p per click bid. This varies by product category so only a starting point. You need / can define this yourself, be an experimenter….

If you get no impressions after two days, up the bid per click. 

After one week, run a keyword report. If you find irrelevant words, add them to your auto campaign as "negative exact match" keywords, which means they won't bring up your advert.