Episode 3 – Pro Tips for Better Amazon PPC and Product Targeting with Liran Hirschkorn

In Episode 3 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we’re really excited to have Liran Hirschkorn, one of our great Amazon Seller Secrets Revealed contributors and Amazon selling pro, back to share eye-opening insights on how to make the most of Amazon advertising!

With the new changes implemented by Amazon in the last several months, mastering Amazon PPC has never been more critical for sellers who want to create and maintain a lucrative Amazon business. Since Amazon introduced the new Product Targeting ad feature in Seller Central, sellers now have a better opportunity to target whole categories or individual ASINs in their ad campaigns.

In episode 3 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Liran discuss the following topics:

• How Bradley and Liran Met
• Product Targeting Ads Available to All Sellers
• How to Use Product Targeting Ads To Improve Sales
• Are Amazon’s Suggestions for Product Targeting Relevant?
• Using Tools Like ASIN Grabber to Get Top 100+ Competitors
• Category Targeting VS ASIN Targeting
• The Power of the “Frequently Bought Together” Section
• How to Use the Search Term Report for Better PPC Results
• Targeting Specific ASINs for Product Targeting Ads
• The Cost of Product Targeting Ads
• Targeting Non-Optimized Product Listings with Ads for Increased Sales
• Using PPC in Your Product Launch Strategy
• What Is Your Strategy for Boosting Sales Without Search Volume Data?
• How to Reach Liran for More Amazon Training

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript:

Bradley Sutton: We’ve got the amazing Liran Hirschkorn, who’s going to give you some amazing strategy, especially in regards to PPC and product targeting.

Bradley Sutton: All right. How’s it going everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast. We have a very special guest. One of my buddies, Liran, who I met at a conference in Florida. I believe, where did we meet originally, Liran?

Liran Hirshkorn: I think this was at the Seller Con conference.

Bradley Sutton: That’s right. Seller Con in Orlando and then we hooked up later and we had some great fun that we won’t mention in Louisiana. We were getting a little bit too much fun, I think Liran, over there on Bourbon Street. So that was–those were some good times. If people don’t think we Amazon sellers know how to party, then you need to come to a conference with us and we’ll show you otherwise.

Liran Hirshkorn: I won’t say what we did, but beads were part of the equation.

Bradley Sutton: Indeed. Indeed the beads. You guys can use your imagination. Anyways, Liran, you are knowledgeable in so many aspects of Amazon and you’re so respected in the game. So there’s so many different topics that we could talk about today, but there’s just a couple of things I wanted to focus on to get your strategies for 2019. And the very first thing I want to talk about is PPC. One thing that is pretty new to everybody is the product targeting ads. Do you think that this is pretty huge deal that now it’s opened up to all sellers?

Liran Hirshkorn: Yes. I think it’s a huge deal that it’s open up to all sellers and I think there’s a–it’s a huge deal in terms of the differences between the way you could do this previously if you’ve had access to AMS. And the reporting and the targeting versus what’s available to us now. So I’m really excited to talk about it because I do think it presents a tremendous opportunity for sellers in a way that you can have controls that you didn’t have before.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. So just for those who are brand new, maybe to Amazon and don’t understand what product targeting ads are. Can you briefly explain that for the newbies out there?

Liran Hirshkorn: Yes. So essentially, all a product targeting ad is basically the ability to put your ad on a specific ASIN, [or] on somebody else’s product detail page. But not in that space that is very crowded that says something like, sponsored ads related to this product with 10, 20, 30 different like ads scrolling there. More prominent placement a lot of times, right under the bullet points and being able to specifically target ASINs where you cannot do that within sponsored product ads.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Thank you for that. So what are some ways that people can leverage this and allow it to help grow their business? Like what kind of strategies do you think are going to work? I know this is kind of brand new, it hasn’t been that much testing yet, but what do you think are going to be the main strategies on how people can leverage this?

Liran Hirshkorn: Yes. So, let’s talk about, you know, why this is so much better than the sponsored product ads type of targeting. So with sponsored product ads–if you’re running auto campaigns, if you’re running manual campaigns–most of your impressions are not coming from, you know, search results pages. They’re actually coming from other people’s detail pages. While it gives you the opportunity to get a lot of impressions and clicks, it doesn’t give you a lot of control. Meaning, when you see those detail pages that have sponsored products related to this item, I can’t necessarily control whether my product shows up on somebody else’s detail page or not. As long as Amazon thinks it’s relevant as part of my keyword targeting, they’re going to show it there. It’s not really something that I can negate. We’ve all seen search term reports, especially for a lot of auto campaigns that show us ASINs, but you can’t really negate those ASINs. The problem is that, you know, if I just came out with a barbecue glove, I probably don’t want to have–and I’m probably not going to win a lot by showing my ad on somebody else’s page who’s got a similar product at maybe 15% lower price than mine. Or maybe I have 10 reviews for my product, and they have a thousand reviews for my product. I don’t control that, so I’m probably not going to get great conversions out of that. But I do want to have my ad on people that I have a competitive advantage on: better price, better reviews, better product differentiation, etc. The product targeting platform allows you to do all of that. So, let’s talk a little bit about how you set it up and what are some of the options. So, the first thing is that this is kind of like a hidden thing. This is within your regular manual campaigns, so you won’t see this anywhere else. But if you go into setting up a regular manual campaign in Seller Central, once you hit manual, you’ll see two different options. You’ll see keywords or product targeting. The product targeting allows you to target both categories where–so if I have a barbecue glove product, I can tell Amazon, you know, show my ad on a bunch of different ASINs in the, you know, kitchen category, right? Or it would probably be more specific than that, but show my ads on a whole bunch of products in this category. I can also give Amazon a specific list of ASINs. Amazon also gives me usually a suggestion for ASINs. I can hit apply all if I wanted to and put my ad and bid there. Again, the nice thing about this is that I control the categories that I choose to bid up to have my ad on. I can control the ASINs and I can also control the bids.

Bradley Sutton: Hey, quick question for you. You mentioned about the suggested ASINs. Now in your experience, you know, before, I mean, I’m assuming this is similar to like a suggested keywords, you know, that they tell you to do, you know, regular sponsored ads too. In your experience, are they suggesting great ASINs? Like would they have been the ones that you would have chosen or, what’s the percentage of the ones that they suggest that you actually use?

Liran Hirshkorn: Some of the ones that they suggest I think are good. Some of the ones are not relevant at all. I think it depends ultimately on sort of your philosophy and how you want it to set things up. You know, for example with sponsored ads, some people it might take like, you know, a thousand keywords, throw it in, get the data, see what happens, right? And that’s one strategy. This is kind of the same thing. You could just–if you want to just set up a quick campaign, you could just hit, like apply all, get the data and then optimize. Or, what I like to do is, yeah, I like to choose the ones. I think are going to be the best. I also like to do research beforehand. I know Helium 10 allows me to do some of this, and find all the ASINs that I want to target. Some advanced tips. This is something I did recently for a good friend of mine, helping set up his campaigns for product targeting was I did some keyword searches, you know, on what would be–where would his top competitors show up. And I looked at all the ASINs on the first page. One of the things that I did that’s may be sort of a hidden tactic is I used RevSeller to actually pull all the variation ASINs. So you know, typically I would only see what’s in stock. What I did was I pulled all the variation ASINs to also target those. So when those come back into stock, if they do, I may be one of the few sellers targeting those ASINs because other people may have missed them if they were out of stock and maybe I can get some cheaper clicks that way. So I really literally extracted using RevSeller, extracted all the ASINs on the listing, brought it into excel, copied and pasted and move that into the product targeting ads.

Bradley Sutton: Oh, that’s pretty cool. I’m actually going to have to bring that up with our development team. I didn’t even know that was kind of a possibility. I know in our–in Black Box we actually show all of the ASINs that aren’t even in stock, but, since we have that information–that’s something cool because we actually have, I don’t know if you’ve used it, the ASIN Grabber.

Liran Hirshkorn: Yes.

Bradley Sutton: And you know Paul Miller, our mutual friend actually. He’s one of the reasons why we met. He came to me with a similar question, you know, this is a month ago and he’s like, “Hey, I want to pull all the top like, you know, two pages of ASINs just so I can drop it into a product targeting campaign.” And I was like, “Yeah, ASIN grabber. You just click it once and it’ll pull all the ASINs from the top two and then you can just paste it into there. So I know he’s using a similar technique as far as that goes. Now, is the only way you can utilize this by pasting the ASINs or is there a such thing as like an auto campaign where Amazon just chooses the ASINs to do?

Liran Hirshkorn: So, there isn’t sort of an auto campaign where Amazon chooses, but there is a category targeting. So, you know, if I chose to do something like, you know, if barbecue gloves was in this category maybe of outdoor grilling or I don’t know specifically what category it would be, then you’re telling Amazon, go ahead and choose the ASINs yourself. And you can do that too. So my recommendation is actually to do both. To do both on a category level and then to also do it on an ASIN level. And then yeah, if you did want sort of Amazon to also choose specific ASINs outside of that, you can also do it within this report–within these suggestions, right? If you want it to accept some or accept all. But the big benefit is that, you know, allowing you to choose, let’s say a category, might help you discover some ASINs that never came across for you. Or maybe there are, you know–if I’m just doing a keyword search for looking at my competitors, maybe I haven’t thought about complementary products, right? Maybe this is a great way to have complementary products, not just the competitors. So if I have a barbecue glove, maybe I should be advertising that barbecue gloves, not only on my competitors, I should be advertising that on all the grills, right? And all the actual like barbecues that are sold on Amazon, and barbecue mats, right? All the complimentary products–I should test that because very possible somebody is going to say, “Hey, I’m going to buy this barbecue glove.” And then, “Hey, let me click on this ad for the brush because I need that too.”

Bradley Sutton: Whoa, hold on. That is just something that’s amazing right there. That just blew my mind, guys. I hope you guys paid attention there because I’d never even thought of that because I think most of us would be like, “Hey, let me just find my direct competitors and put it on there.” But, what’s the figures about the Frequently Bought Together? Like isn’t there a big percentage of products that are bought because of the Frequently Bought Together, right?

Liran Hirshkorn: Yeah. I think something like, you know, 15% of sales on Amazon come as a result of being like on other detailed pages.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, and that was the, you know–I know Frequently Bought Together is a big one but Frequently Bought Together is actually farther down the page than some of these product targeted ads that come up right below the buy box. So theoretically speaking, I mean these complimentary products–that’s totally a great one to target. Actually, there’s a new feature in Black Box that we just released that’s perfect for this, where you can enter in an ASIN and it’s going to give to you a full list of the Frequently Bought Together products that come with that ASIN and even the Customer Also Bought products that come with that ASIN. What’s an example of how this Frequently Bought Together can work?

Liran Hirshkorn: Think of somebody who–let’s say next week I’m about to bring a new puppy home for my family okay? And I’m going on Amazon right now and I’m shopping for some stuff, right?

Bradley Sutton: I hope your daughter’s not listening. She might hold you up to that.

Liran Hirshkorn: But, you know, I’m taking her to Disney World this week, so that should be better than a puppy.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. There we go.

Liran Hirshkorn: So, let’s talk about that, right? I’m going on Amazon and I’m going to do some shopping and I’m probably going to look for maybe a crate and maybe I’m going to do some crat,e training. Right? I probably also need other products, right? I’m going to need a leash. I might need some dog food. I might need some dog toys. I might need a spray that I’m going to put on my furniture, so this new puppy doesn’t chew up my stuff, right? I’m going to need–I might need one of those, you know, baby gate type things, right? If I’m going to keep the dog during the day when I’m at work, like in the kitchen or whatever, right? I’m going to need all these different things. And so I think it would make a lot of sense to put in an ad on a crate for a dog, right? Because they’re going to have that. Now, ultimately it’s something that you’re going to need to test because maybe that will convert well, maybe that won’t convert well. But yeah, I think with this product targeting, you could definitely go beyond, you know, just looking at your competitors, which I think is what most people are currently doing and looking at, you know, complimentary products because I mean, it just makes a lot of sense if I’m buying this, what other products is this person buying? And to put it in, you know, in front of that. And the truth is if they did click on your ad, they are probably interested. If they didn’t convert, maybe that’s more of an issue with your product, right? But if somebody, if you have a crate and somebody clicks on your dog leash, then we can see that they are interested in these complementary products. And you know, many times when somebody is going on Amazon to buy, right? They’re buying or something just like this, I’m not just going to buy one product. They’re going to buy, you know, they’re going on vacation and you know, they need to buy sunglasses and, you know, shorts, right? Or whatever.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah.

Liran Hirshkorn: So I think it makes a lot of sense. Now with this product targeting, the ability to optimize is tremendous like we’ve never had before because the search term report will show you every single ASINs. So let’s say I just chose this category, right? The search term report and on a category I can choose a bid, a single bid. To me a category is almost like an auto campaign on a regular sponsor ad. Choose a category, it’s almost like telling Amazon auto and then Amazon puts my head on a bunch of different ASIN. The search term report is going to give me all the ASINs where I got clicks and impressions. So if I see, let’s say–so, I’m going to filter that search term report in two ways. One, I’m going to filter all the ASINs that had good results for me. So maybe my target is like 30%. I’m going to look at everything between, you know, 0.1 up to like 30, 40% and I’m going to look at what has been successful. At the same time, I’m going to filter that search term report to see what are all the ASINs that maybe got 10 clicks and no sales, right? And maybe–so let’s talk about what we could do with that. Well, I’ve been on this category, let’s say a dollar and I see that there is an ASIN within that category and the search term report that had, you know, 10 clicks and I got two sales or something. And that’s good. And now what I can do with that is that we can now hold that specific ASIN and then add it to the campaign. So I can target that ASIN specifically. Why? Because now I can control an exact bid for that ASIN. So maybe that ASIN is highly competitive and I need to, you know, raising the bid is going to get me more impressions and it’s converting really well for me and just being itself in the category, right? So it’s almost like extracting something out of an auto campaign where I have one bid for the entire auto campaign and now I can target it specifically like an exact match and optimize a bid around that exact match keyword. The same way I can optimize a bid around this specific targeted ASIN. So what I do is I pull the search term report and you know, no software tool does this yet as far as I know. So this is something you need to do manual. So what I do is I pull that search term report, I pulled that ASIN, and I add it back in manually to the campaign with a specific bid that’s going to be, you know, specifically for that ASIN. And then you kind of monitor your impressions and your ACoS and you can adjust the bid. By the way, kind of an annoying thing that I hope Amazon changes is that the search term report right now, it gives you ASINs in lowercase and if you just copy and paste that ASIN into your campaign, Amazon’s not going to pull it up. So you actually have to change that ASIN from lowercase. Like lowercase b to a capital B, in order for it to pull up. So if it doesn’t pull up for you, change it into a capital.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. So guys, download that report and then you’re using helium 10, use Frankenstein. Frankenstein can change things to capital, lowercase and you can do that with a couple of clicks.

Liran Hirshkorn: Okay. Awesome.

Bradley Sutton: Yes.

Liran Hirshkorn: That’s something I need to do instead of driving myself crazy–manually changing.

Bradley Sutton: Here’s the question, you mentioned search term reports and that’s based on the, like if you’re doing the ASIN, in the category, but what about, you know, the original search term reports from like your regular PPC, how they used to show ASINs, right? So before always people would ask, hey, can I take those ASINs and target? I’m like, no, you can’t do that then, you know, way back in the day. But now you can, right? With this?

Liran Hirshkorn: Yes. So that’s a fantastic point. That can be a very, very good starting point for targeting ASINs because you know that those ASINs have proven to convert for you and they’ve proven to convert in a crowded field, right? Because you’ve been showing up and sponsored ads related to this product among a lot of other products there versus now you’re going to get more prominent placement. So yeah, I think that’s a great point on where to start pulling ASINs from. Things that have converted for you before, in the auto campaigns where it shows you those ASINs–is great. And then the other thing you could do obviously is, besides for specific targeting, you can now pull the ASINs that are not converting well and you can actually add those as negative targets. And it does actually work in this, in this product targeting campaign where it doesn’t work like you said in the auto campaign. So I think–so this is why I really like this and I’ll give credit to–I heard Sherry [inaudible], I think? She goes by the Urban Cowgirl.

Bradley Sutton: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Liran Hirshkorn: I heard her recently on a podcast. Talk about how, you know, you really want to gel together the combination of product targeting ads with sponsored ads together. You know, because people don’t necessarily buy in just sort of one search type of transaction, right? So somebody might click on my ad, then they might go again do a keyword search and if the person has seen you a few times, you now have a much better opportunity to convert that buyer. And so your product targeting ads are probably going to ultimately perform better if you are–if you also have, you know, other things built in together with them, like headline ads and like sponsored product ads and have good visibility. So now the customer has seen you, you know, a few times. They’ve seen you on a page. It may be–they may have clicked on it and maybe not. Then they go and do a keyword search and have seen you in headline or you know, sponsored product top of the fold. And you’re able to capture that sale. So, I do think that’s, you know, probably the case and having this combination of visibility in multiple places, it’s really helpful. But the biggest, the biggest benefit of this is that you can choose where to target. So, you know, go after all those, right? If you have, you know, four, four and a half, five stars, go after all those like three star products, right? Go after all those three and a half star product. Go after all the products that are, you know, pricing much higher than you. Go after products that you have a competitive advantage. And you can really capture traffic where you have a lot more control on where you’re targeting versus where we didn’t have this ability before. And even in AMS, you know, I had product targeting ads in AMS. AMS actually was a little bit different because it allowed you to actually put some copy around it, where in seller central you can’t. But the downside of those products targeting ads and AMS product displays is what it’s called, is that you didn’t get the data on. If you targeted 10 ASINs in one campaign, Amazon didn’t give you the data on which of those ASINs were performing well. And so the only way to really optimize was to target one or two or three ASINs in a campaign. And you have to set up a lot of campaigns so that you can see what the overall results of that one specific campaign is. And if you only had one ASIN in that campaign you knew that ASIN was specifically performing well or not. Now, you no longer need to do any of that. You have–Amazon is giving you all the data around these ads. So I think it is a tremendous opportunity also, you know, right now I imagine it’s not being utilized by a lot of sellers yet. And so, you know, ultimately the, the bids, the opportunities are just going to be much better probably than a year or two for now when this is more widely adopted, right? We know that..

Bradley Sutton: What are the bids, like what’s the ACoS compared to a regular, you know, the old ones. And are there cheap bids or how’s that working for you?

Liran Hirshkorn: Yes, there, there is opportunity for a lot of cheap bids. At the same time, you know, if you look at, you know, bestsellers in categories. Then you have enough people bidding where the bids are, you know, not necessarily cheap. You could be bidding a dollar, dollar 50 to $2 on some, you know, very competitive terms. At the same time, you’ll have an opportunity to syphon off, you know, a good amount of traffic off of those. And if you can convert, you know, I think you can do very well with it. It’s also again, a great way to build up visibility and traction on a new product. Even if you’d take this as, you know, this is part of my launch strategy, right? So I want to be able to just get as many sales, as many reviews out of the gate. And so maybe your goal up front is not to have a 30% ACoS. Maybe your goal is I need to be able to get my first, you know, a hundred, 200, 300 sales so that I can get, you know, a few reviews on my product, right? So then, then maybe then I can do, you know, a launch or maybe you know, and be able to stick better because I have a few refuse power, right? So, um, so it’s just another area that gives you the ability to get a significant amount of traffic. So I think bids are all over the place, but the more–the better your strategy, the better you can take advantage of it. Just like for example, you know, extracting things that are out of stock. Maybe something’s been out of stock for a few months now. Again, a lot of people who are currently looking or not going to see that, but when that product comes back in stock, and if you do this on a mass scale, some of those products will. Then now you’re able to bid on some things that maybe a lot of people are not, are not bidding up.

Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Now here’s a question. I made a video a couple of weeks. I’ve never actually–in any of my old customers from before I worked at Helium10, I still have access to a lot of their Amazon accounts and they allow me to test stuff. But this product targeting something I haven’t tested by. I still went ahead and made a video about how to use Helium10 with this product targeting. So let me, let me, I don’t think you’ve seen it probably. I don’t even know if it’s released, but let me just run it by you just to make sure that it makes sense. So what I was doing or what I was showing in this video was I was using Black Box and then I would run filters. Filter by like let’s say my main keyword, let’s say it was collagen peptide. So I’ll say show me all the listings that have collagen peptides in the title. But then what I would do is I would say selling at least $500 a month or $1,000 a month or whatever. And then I would do one for–once it had zero review, you know? And then I would do once it had only 2.5 stars. And then I would do ones that only had two or three images, you know, it’s like kind of under optimized. Is that a good video you think? I mean is that accurate to like target those kind of products? Those would be prime targets of ones that are obviously getting sales, so they’re obviously getting a lot of page views, but then probably have an ugly listing or something wrong with it that you can come in and maybe steal some of their sales.

Liran Hirshkorn: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a great strategy. I would filter price also if I could. So, anybody that’s either around us–especially those products, right? On those sort of, you know, if I could do a campaign around sort of inferior product targets to mine, you know, maybe I would have them be around the same price or maybe a dollar or two less. So whenever a certain percentage and higher–and those are all prime targets. You know, so I think that’s all really, really good to target. And then again you want to pull that search term report to optimize the data. And then you know, maybe then you do a separate campaign to target, you know, high traffic opportunities, right? So maybe then you look at everything from collagen peptides that you know is going to have, you know, is going to be on the first page or the first two pages for some of these keywords without necessarily paying attention to what the reviews are, what things are like just to see the traffic that you get and where you can convert and where you’re not converting on those, on those targets. And set up some different campaigns based on the group of ASINs that you’re, that you’re targeting.

Bradley Sutton: As a couple more questions I have, we only have a couple more minutes here. But one of these, depending on if you answer yes or no will determine like the next time we have you on the podcast, maybe we can talk about it. But you had mentioned about PPC as being part of your launch strategy. Now let me ask you something. Have you launched products only on PPC? Like without doing a giveaway or something?

Liran Hirshkorn: Yes.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, that’s a conversation all in itself probably.

Liran Hirshkorn: Yes, all its own. And then also, you know, I think there’s a certain life cycle and timing that you want to get right. But, so yeah, so I had some new products this Q4 and one of my concerns was one I only have a certain amount of inventory that I have available for this Q4. I won’t be able to place a reorder and still get more. So I’m a little bit more cautious with the amount of units I want to, I want to give away when I can probably sell them. Two, new products in Q4. Sale velocity is a lot higher and I can–for my competition. It’s going to be harder for me. I’m probably gonna need to do–to give away more units to try to rank and, you know, whether or not that’s going to stay, or maybe without reviews initially off the bat. I have limited amount of time was another factor. So I had some new products that I was able to basically do very well with. I had four new products–this Q4, and I would say three out of four were home runs and when it’s just okay. And none of them for–any of those products, especially because of the timing of when they came in. I didn’t do a launch around those products. I only use PPC. I think one of the benefits obviously of doing this in Q4 is that I could, uh, I could drive a lot of traffic using PPC and I differentiated my products enough where I could still drive sales even without reviews starting out. So I think that can definitely work. I have another new product now that I launched right after–before that I launched in like the first week of January that I have not done a launch so far. It’s selling okay. Not as good as I’d like it to be, but I’m getting traction and I’m tracking my keywords and I am making movements on keyword. My top keyword I think has a few thousand searches a month right now. And I’m like position 14, and all of that is just from PPC and I am targeting that that’s a keyword that is proven to convert well in an auto and broad. And then now I’ve also pulled into an exact match. So I am very specifically targeting this keyword because it’s very relevant to my product. So the answer is yes, I think you can launch just on PPC. My plan with this product is that after I have a certain amount of reviews, then I’m probably going to do a launch on it because I want to, you know, I think you want to make sure that you can stick to landing, right? It’s something that we often talk about and I think having those reviews in place is going to be helpful. So I’m probably going to generate the first few hundred sales on the product just from PPC. My PPC is not profitable at this point. But again, with my first order on a product, I’m more concerned about getting traction, getting reviews, getting ranking than I am about profitability out of the gate. And I think that’s the way you really need to see. You need to see your business as a long term business. I’m setting up this product to make a killing you for 2019 not to make a killing, you know, the first three, six months of 2019.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. All right. That’s just, you’ve given some very valuable information here. I wish we could go on for another half hour, but one last question. I’m assuming you’re a multiple seven figure seller. Would that be a correct statement?

Liran Hirshkorn: Yes.

Bradley Sutton: And when did you become a seven figure seller? Like what year? Do you remember?

Liran Hirshkorn: I believe 2016.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So this was before there was a such thing as exact phrase search volume. So you know, a lot of the newer sellers are just started last year. They think the sky is falling because, oh my goodness, there’s no exact phrase search volume or how can I do my research? So this is from the horses mouth here. Somebody who became a seven figure seller before there is even a such thing as exact phrase search volume. How was your strategy different than, or like you know, let’s say, you know, of course a lot of tools are going to start using historical data, but of course, you know, there, there’s other brand new, you know, there’s going to be the next fidget spinner that there’s not going to be any historical data. There’s going to be iPhone 11 cases that you can’t look at 2018 data. So for the sellers who are really worried about launching in these brand new categories where there’s no historical data, how did you do it in 2016 and 2015 when you didn’t have that metric?

Liran Hirshkorn: I would say we used–I use tools that didn’t have accurate search volume data that tried to estimate search volume data. I think what you need to understand is that it’s a level playing fields, right? That’s my biggest concern. My biggest concern is that the seller–that’s my competition has information that I don’t have, which is not the case anymore, right? So one, it’s a level playing field. Two, there were tools that tried to estimate it. We now know that those tools were way off, but that’s what everybody sort of went after and they use sort of–use algorithms that would give you more of a relative information as opposed to accurate information. As well as using common sense, right? I mean, you know, you can see things that the Amazon auto suggest gives you, right. Those are going to be things that are searched more. I know that barbecue gloves is probably a main keyword for barbecue, right? A common sense, you know. I think you have to get away from saying I’m only looking at numbers, but by using common sense, you know, there’s just going to be keyword set. Like, you know, when I started out saying, okay, what am I going to target for PPC? Wasn’t based necessarily on like what the search volume is? Like, what are the top 10 things I think of when I think of this product, right? What are the top 10 ways I would search for this keyword when I look at this product? And then there were some tools again with any accurate information in this per se, but I would use the relative information, the fact that they told me that, why would your gloves has more searches than barbecue grilling gloves? Right? It just kinda makes sense. So I think you want to use common sense, you want to use the top keywords that you would focus on that. If you’re thinking of those keywords and maybe you ask your friend or your spouse or somebody else, then those are the same keywords that your customers are gonna to be using, right? So if you want to try to think of yourself from a customer standpoint. What are the top things that somebody’s searching for? And I would venture to say that if I didn’t have any of these tools, that’s the way I would do it. And those are the keywords that I would go after. Just understanding the niche. You can then go out, and you know, you can look at Google, you can look at some other places on the web where you can sort of see, okay, in Google how many more people are searching for barbecue gloves, some barbecue grilling gloves. They’re still giving you some, some amount of data. At the end of the day, I think it’s using the tools that are out there combined with common sense. And you know, not freaking out. Just think about all the information, you know, Amazon shares with you right? The seller data on having, you know, knowing how much product sells. Like all the information that we currently have is a tremendous opportunity that we don’t have on any other platform. So I think you used the tools that are out there and know that it’s a level playing field and use common sense.

Bradley Sutton: All right, man. Thank you so much. You’ve dropped some great knowledge bombs on us today, especially about the product targeting and about some of your strategy. So you actually help people with their PPC, helped them with their Amazon accounts. You have a great training program. Actually, myself and my wife have both taken the Amazing Freedom training. So that’s great. So how can people find out about, you know, if they want to reach out to you to get some help? What’s your contact?

Liran Hirshkorn: Sure. So, we have a Facebook group called the Amazing Freedom Amazon Sellers. We do manage PPC. It’s amazingfreedom.com/ppc, and you can always just reach out to me on Facebook. Send me a private message and I’m sure we can connect.

Bradley Sutton: All right. Thank you Liran so much and we’ll definitely have you on a future podcast.

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