Why Most Amazon Ad Accounts Are Overcomplicated (And Quietly Burning Budget) | EP. #233

Andrew Maff 00:00
I think there's a problem with some agencies where they feel that they need to go so big that they actually end up failing.

Narrator 00:12
Welcome to the Ecomm Show podcast. I am your host, Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTuskr. From groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e-commerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.

Andrew Maff 00:27
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Ecomm Show. Are we at it again? So, I gotta talk about Amazon ads, I know, I know, there's.. it's got to get old, right? Like, it's got a.. it's old for me. Like, I feel like everyone in their mother is always talking about Amazon advertising this, Amazon advertising that. There's probably like a dozen podcasts that do it, but I can't help but feel like I'm missing something.

Andrew Maff 01:03
Shit, even when you go on LinkedIn, there's like, who knows how many people are talking about Amazon ad stuff. So, in the past, I pulled a report, because I was like, this is a weird trend. In the past month, we have, we do refer to them as like performance reviews. It's a little bit deeper than it's an audit, but it's kind of expanded on that. So basically we pull reports out of everything, right? So sponsored brands, sponsored products, all the search term reports, impression share reports, a bulk report, like basically every single thing that we can get out of Amazon, we pull it out, and we've developed like kind of a an internal AI like reporting process that basically we can give it all the reports but also provide it nuance into issues with seasonality inventory issues, goals sell through targets, like we can basically provide it literally everything, and so then we can also evaluate based on like our assumptions, and then it kind of can dig in and kind of evaluate like, and it spits out a whole review of like I think it's like 15 pages or something like that, that basically states all the problems that we're seeing. If there's an efficiency problem, if there's a scale problem, if it's both things to factor in, and then it kind of maps out, like if the goal is to hit x, then here's, you know, here's the reality of how long it will take to get there, and then it's usually like a 30-60-90 day plan, kind of thing. So, it's like the steps that you have to take to get it there. So, it's more than just like, here's your problems, it's also like, all right, here's how you get to where you want to go.

Andrew Maff 02:53
Anyway, I digress. So, basically, last month we did, I think it was 12 or 13 of them, and there was, I think, all of them. I think there was one where maybe this wasn't a problem, but there was, yeah, there was one where it was like a heavy branded thing, where the agency was just piggybacking off of like a ton of advertising they were doing off Amazon. That one I'm not going to talk about. So, let's say it was 12. Sorry, so all of them, every single one, had the same problem, and it's kind of weird. So, obviously, like, look, when someone's coming to us for one of these performance review things, it's mainly because they're having problems, right? No one really comes to us looking for like guidance and help, if it's going well, like usually your business, the last you're focused on putting out fires and solving things that aren't going as well as you'd like them to. So, if it's going well, we're not going to hear from you. So, we rarely look at bad accounts or good accounts, we only look at bad ones. So, this is common that we're going to see issues. However, it was weird that every single one of them had the same problem.

Andrew Maff 04:01
Now, here's what I'd say: out of the 12, eight out of 12 of them didn't have any sponsored brand campaigns running. I don't, I don't get that, that was the majority it wasn't the thing that I saw across all of them, but the, that, like, what, like that one, I just didn't understand some of them. The one, there's a couple of them too, where it was so shocking because they had a good amount of data around terms that they could absolutely go after heavier, where they had clear, like, exact match, spin them out, put them into a sponsored brand, and just own that term. Not only that, but they also had great creative from an off-Amazon perspective that they could have leveraged for sponsored brand videos, like they had a ton of data and assets to lean into it, and it was just completely untouched. It's really impressed. Said when we get into an account and all we see are sponsored products, like why, like it sponsored brands have been out for years and years and years, it's additional real estate, you can educate better, you can own the whole, like a whole section, like you get way more real estate, like it's just I just I don't know, man, like it's like to the point where I'm like, why is this still a thing? Why are we still having these conversations? I, this is going to turn into another vent session, where I'm just like, it's 2026 at a certain point, can we please elevate and like move on to the next like tranche of stuff, like let's, let's talk about, you know, in like a significantly more higher level things than like, yeah, you need to have sponsored brands, and yes, you need to have a nice listing, like, it's let's go, like, come on!

Andrew Maff 05:47
Anyway, so no sponsored brands running, that was amazing, sponsored brands to me, it's super simple, like, look, there's arguments around its attribution, there's arguments around cost of it, there's arguments around how it can work for certain brands versus others. Obviously, there's arguments for if you have like a really, really crazy small product line, you don't have a ton of products to send them anywhere else besides just a product page, and that's obviously a big difference. But you still have sponsored brand videos, you still have the ability to create a storefront and turn into a landing page, at least like sometimes we'll actually take storefronts and develop like a landing page concept just for certain terms that we're going after, just so that we can take them to a page that doesn't have competitors all over it, like, you know, there's there's downsides to sending them straight to your listing, because it's littered with all of your competitors, so, like, I don't know, it's just weird to, like, not do that. Now, there's been changes with sponsored products now around like imagery and how they advertise and all that fun stuff, so it's a little bit different, but it's still, it's still like, you still, what, like, come on, like, let's go use it, like, so it's crazy when we go in there and we have to pull all this reporting and do all this stuff, and like, I know what this thing's going to say, it's going to tell you, like, hey, you should totally do sponsored brands, and that's basically what it says.

Andrew Maff 07:02
You know, and even then, with the direction of it, and there's theories around attribution, and all that stuff, like I said, like the most obvious way to use that, the most simplistic way is once you find those top performers, you have split out from sponsored products that you're focused on from an exact match perspective, take all those bad boys and build out some sponsor brands with it. You've proven them out, you know it's going to do well. Own that real estate, own that spot. But anyway, that was really amazing that all of 12 of them all had that.

Andrew Maff 07:34
Now the thing that they all had, and this is stemming from I don't know if I think there's a problem with some agencies where they feel that they need to, they need to go so big that they actually end up failing most of the time, and I don't know if it's like a, we got to come out swinging and really impress, and obviously, yeah, you do, that's what most people want, but at the same time, there's just not, there's not a smart strategy around it, so one thing all of them had, they all had the same problem, it was a mix of, depending on the goal, it was either an efficiency problem or a scale problem, but they were all, whether they had an efficiency problem or whether they had a scale problem, or whether it was both, they all were structured effectively the same way that was causing these issues, so to explain and kind of expand on that, I agencies that I've found, at least the ones that we looked at last month, it's like they want to come into your account and they convince you that the more and more granular you get, the more control that you have, and that is bullshit.

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Andrew Maff 09:36
We went into an account, it had like, I don't know, 10 products, maybe like that, and it had 330 something live campaigns, like what? Why? No, there's no need. So then the issue becomes when you, when you spread your campaign so thin like that, A even if you've got automation in place, it's very hard to like manage that with like a close enough eye, and what ends up happening, especially with some of these automations, depending on how you've set up, they'll scale up budget, they'll scale back budget. Sneeze. We might edit that out. I don't know. We may not. We might leave it in. Sorry. So we scale up budget, scale back, scale up bids, we scale up, up and down, blah blah.

Andrew Maff 10:31
Anyway, the problem becomes that you end up in this situation where you've got agencies, they want to put a cap on all of these specific campaigns, and it's really like it's an 80, it's a very clear 80-20 rule, almost every single time we're like, hey, 20% of your campaigns are doing the heavy lifting in terms of return, the other 80% are bleeding you out, and then yeah, so what they end up doing is they spread them so thin and they want to control them, where if it starts to bleed out, you know, we, we keep it kind of honed in, and so the budget stays low, and so what ends up happening is that you only get a few clicks during the shittiest time of day, like in the middle of the night, or something like that, and then you kind of hit a cap in your budget, and they don't, then it ends right, so like you're at a budget cap, and it doesn't run anymore, obviously, that's the day, so the problem is you end up spending money on these tiny little campaigns that only spend, like, you know, depending on how it's set up. Most of the ones we were looking at, they only had like 10, maybe $20 a day to film, if that, and they would like hit a cap by like the morning, and then they would just sit there because they ran out of budget during like peak shopping hours, and so what we realized was, like, all of the, because they're all hitting there, even though they're granular and they're split out the way they are, there's not enough budget behind these to actually run for the full day, and even when you have an automation in place, it's going to think that they're bottom performers, because by the middle of, by the morning, they've already spent some money on people that were really just window shopping and doing nothing.

Andrew Maff 11:59
So you run into this issue where you've got dozens, sometimes hundreds, in this case campaigns where they've spent like 10,15, bucks, and maybe only converted like didn't convert at all, or maybe only once, or something like that, and so if they've got automation set up, it looks like shit, and so they don't run them, but then you have dozens or hundreds of them, and now you've just spent 1000s of dollars a day burning on stuff that's just not working, so like what we've found is like it's I can't, I don't want to, we have a name for it internally and I can't, I don't want to say it because it's not nice, it's oh man, I'm trying to think of an equivalent to it right now. It's just too funny for me not to say it.

Andrew Maff 12:47
So, it's.. it's.. uh, we call it big ego syndrome, where these agencies come out and they want to split everything out so granularly that it ends up bleeding people out, and we, I mean, if I'm completely honest with you, we love it when we come, when we've come across this, oh great, we're going to, this is like, we're going to prove out that we're not idiots within like a month, like it's gonna be easy to just kill these, move these campaigns, move these keywords into these campaigns, increase the budget on these campaigns, give them some room to run, get rid of the bleeders, boom, problem solved, like it's, it's pretty quick and painless. The other issue is this, the scale side, right? So, that's kind of the efficiency burn, because you're like, we're spending so much, we're not really generating one once we, what we once were, and it's because the agency convinced you that you have to go super, super granular.

Andrew Maff 13:37
Don't get me wrong, I'm not telling you you need to have four campaigns, no, once you find top performers, they should be split out, but there's got to be a strategy behind how they're split out in the direction that you're doing it, otherwise you bleed, right? And so that's your efficiency problem. That same structure is the problem across everything, because it also causes a scale problem. So the other issue with the scale side of things is that you've split everything out so thin that you can't figure out where to increase and where not to, because you're not able to get enough data into any one individual campaign, so you don't know where should I increase and where should I decrease.

Andrew Maff 14:19
So this was a problem we were just looking at someone's account, and this specific account had, in fact, yeah, it was 200 something campaigns in there, 200 something campaigns, only like a dozen or so, 15 maybe products, and a good chunk of them were branded, surprise, surprise, which is fine. Like, don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking branded. I think everyone needs to run ads on branded, otherwise your competitors will.

Andrew Maff 14:44
So, but the non-branded stuff, they had split it so thin that when you.. the easiest way to tell this was the problem, it's one report that I'm always shocked, not a lot of people look at. Pull your impression share report. Take a look at, like, your search term impression share report and see how often are you actually getting most of the impressions for those keywords, if it's one of your top keywords, and you have a low impression, like we actually had one situation where an agency had convinced the brand that there was a reduction in search volume in their top keywords that blew my mind, because I was like, this product is A I actually am relative, I'm like personally relatively familiar with the category, because I use this stuff, and I'm like, there's no way, it's been growing in popularity, and I was like, that can't make any sense, and then, of course, we pulled Helium 10 data, we pulled Data Dive data, we looked to try to look at all of them, because they all, they all say their own things, so we looked at all of them, we were like, no, like, there's no way, I was like, there's some area, there's some, there was a, I think Helium 10 said they were flat year over year, Data Dive said, like, it's been up a little bit year over year, so either way, so I was like, okay, so there's no reason for you to be down, I think, like they were down 45% year over year, something ridiculous like that.

Andrew Maff 16:07
So, you factor in, like, okay, it's competition, and then we look at the competitors, we're like, no, actually it's about they had a couple more, but like, that was about it. So, nothing crazy in terms of new competition coming in, and so what had actually happened was the agency had split out these top performing keywords so thin that they had low budgets on each of them to keep them from bleeding out, but they would, they didn't want to increase it because they weren't getting enough data into each individual campaign, but they also didn't want to completely turn off the keyword because it used to be a top performer, and so they just sat there with it and really did nothing, and I don't know what the plan was, because I didn't know if they were just waiting for this so on so-called leftover search volume that's no longer around anymore.

Andrew Maff 16:48
But when we looked at it, we're like, we pulled impression share reports, I'm like, you're barely hitting 20% for these top keywords, so you're not actually showing that frequently. So when we were able to pull all that information, it really helped us understand, like, okay, going incredibly granular, you can't, you can't go into an account and then immediately go, let's split everything out there, it just can't, it doesn't make sense, you have to, it's a, it's a growth concept, it's a over time, we're going to pull in data, we're going to decipher top performing keywords, we're going to possibly move them, if you're using maybe you're using auto campaigns or whatever for for prospecting, and then you move it into like a phrase match and control it a little bit and confirm like okay, yes, this is a good keyword, then you move it into its own campaign from an exact match perspective, pour some gas on it and try to own it, but then you might have other keywords that come in that are extremely similar to that one, and it might be good to keep it in that campaign, and that is always very, very dependent on the situation.

Andrew Maff 17:52
It could be dependent on the keyword, could depend on the product, could depend on the brand, could depend on the owner's goals, could depend on your budget. Smaller brands that aren't spending a ton, you don't want to have 500 campaigns, because you're splitting that budget out too thin. If you've got a bigger brand with a huge budget, it's a different problem. So, it's this like they go in and they completely revamp the whole account, and they just spread everything so thin that they pin their backs up against the wall, because you can't pull back on budget, because you've already got things pretty low, and you're just leaning in on a few campaigns, and you can't go up in your budget, because, according to your data, even though your data is super low, it's telling you a lot of these campaigns are bleeding, and so then they just start pointing at things like, like lack of search volume, which was my new favorite excuse, so to kind of summarize this, the big thing that we saw across every single one of those that we did was way too granular, hundreds of campaigns, most of them no sponsored brands, which also means that they probably should have more campaigns, and split so thin that the weird.. like, I always hate when I go into an account and it's like, oh, it's like a, the budget's like $11.50 a day, like, can we please do round numbers, I don't know if it's like an OCD thing, but like that's not strategic, that's just weird, so that's a, that's a me thing, but like that's not enough.

Andrew Maff 19:15
Like if you think the average, the average listing has anywhere from like a 20 to like a 40% ish conversion rate, you, if you're doing like $8 a day campaigns and your average cost per clicks like $1.50 you'll be lucky if you get one or two conversions, especially from because the other thing is, too, by the way, which really hard to do in Amazon you almost basically can't. If you could look at your conversion rate from midnight to like 6am versus your conversion rate from like maybe 11am to like 4pm and see what that conversion rate is, they're very different conversion rates.

Andrew Maff 20:00
So you're bidding based off of the people that are kind of just like an up in the middle of the night and kind of just window shopping, it's the people that are actually pulling the trigger that you care about, but you need to make sure that there's budget to reach them. So, having campaigns where your budget is capping out is almost stupid, unless you have like some ridiculous like defensive mechanism in place.

Andrew Maff 20:19
So, I highly recommend, for anyone who's listening to this, if you're an agency, stop splitting things out so much. Do it, phase it in, don't do it from a to z, slowly phase in spinning out top performers. Don't go into an account and just whack the whole thing down to 5000 campaigns, and if you're a brand and you go into your account and you see that you've got 500 campaigns running, and they all have budgets for like 10, $15, you got to re-look at that, because chances are I'll bet you, if you look at all of them over like a 30 day or a 60 day basis, I'll bet you a bunch of those are probably not hitting ACOS targets for you. That was my rant for the day. These are great therapy sessions. So, thank you for joining me. Appreciate it. Thank you all for joining me, as usual. Rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the Ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But, as usual, thank you all for joining me. See you next time

Narrator 21:19
Thank you for tuning in to the E-comm show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the Bluetuskr YouTube channel. The E-comm show is brought to you by Bluetuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E-comm show!