Navigating the Future of E-commerce Advertising with Navah Hopkins: Uniting SEO, PPC, and AI

Unlock the secrets of the digital advertising realm with us as we explore the journey of Navah Hopkins, a seasoned e-commerce advertising expert. Discover how Navah transitioned from teaching dreams to shaping the future of SEO and PPC marketing. With her experience in navigating the ever-changing digital landscape since 2008, you’ll gain insights into the ethical dilemmas and strategic shifts that led her to embrace PPC. This episode promises a deep dive into the integration of PPC with SEO and the transformative role of AI in this burgeoning $91 billion industry.

Our conversation spans the evolution of advertising platforms, likening modern problem-solving to the once-dominant yellow pages. Navah shares how being present in the digital marketing space can secure a brand’s status as a default consumer choice, similar to Amazon’s rise to prominence. We also highlight the complexities of combining PPC and SEO strategies, the hidden challenges in automatic platform settings, and the value of accurate data interpretation on platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Nava sheds light on common advertising mistakes and offers practical advice on avoiding pitfalls that can mislead decision-making.

As we look towards the future, Navah shares her vision for the untapped potential of video advertising, particularly on platforms like Amazon where low competition offers a cost-effective edge. From influencer marketing to TikTok’s global reach, we explore innovative strategies that maximize ad performance and attribution. Join us in uncovering how Navah Hopkins is leading the charge in ethical and innovative digital marketing, paving the way for what lies ahead in this dynamic industry.

In episode 431 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Navah discuss:

• 00:00 – AI Impact on SEO and Advertising
• 11:18 – AI’s Impact on Branding and Consumers
• 14:11 – Navigating Different Online Advertising Platforms
• 14:59 – Evolution From Unknown to Default
• 22:01 – Google Ads Reporting Trustworthiness
• 23:00 – Avoiding Common Advertising Pitfalls
• 25:40 – Data Analysis for Marketing Decisions
• 31:23 – Discussion on Automated Tools and AI
• 32:34 – Vendor Selection for E-Commerce Sellers
• 35:10 – Payment Models in Marketing Strategies
• 38:22 – The Future of Video Advertising
• 42:58 – Amazon Prime’s Transactional Ad Advantage
• 45:25 – Maximizing Google Ads Performance and Attribution
• 48:21 – Call Tracking and Attribution in Marketing
• 53:39 – Connecting With Nava Hopkins on Optimization
• 55:16 – Kevin King’s Words of Wisdom

Transcript

Kevin King:

Welcome to episode 431 of the AM/PM Podcast. I’m your host, Kevin King, and this week I’ve got Navah Hopkins on the show. We talk about everything advertising, and not just your standard PPC that everybody knows, but all the different opportunities that are out there for advertising, from driving outside traffic to video advertising to being on Amazon Prime the whole nine yards. This is a great episode for more of the top minds and leading experts when it comes to advertising on e-commerce. Enjoy this episode with Navah. Welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. Ms. Navah Hopkins, how are you doing?

Navah:

I am doing fantastically well, Kevin, thank you so much for having me. Listeners don’t realize this, but I was actually a touch late and everyone was gracious enough to include the platform and include the conversation. I’m very excited to be here.

Kevin King:

I’m glad you’re here too. I’ve been following a little bit of what you’ve been doing on LinkedIn and a few places. It looks like you’ve been involved in everybody’s favorite thing to do when it comes to e-commerce, and that’s PPC and advertising, but it looks like you’ve been doing this for a day or two back to the SEO, like doing tons of SEO back in the day and stuff. Is that true?

Navah:

Yeah, so I actually started off back in 2008 in the SEO side and what was interesting is I fell into SEO after deciding I didn’t want to be an English teacher because I wouldn’t be effective or paid enough. So I stumbled into SEO, while also taking the certifications to do Google Ads. So I sold Google Ads inventory, did a little bit there while doing directory SEO, and when Panda and Penguin came out, I just like this, I’m going to just go straight on and straight into PPC. But I always try to keep a little bit of that SEO empathy because it is really important that when you’re managing your channels you don’t think of them in silos, that you kind of understand the synergy between them. So yes. I did start off in SEO and, yes, I am very happy to be a PPC first marketer.

Kevin King:

What got you to SEO? Was it because you said you’re teaching English?

Navah:

I wanted to be an English teacher. I went to school to be an English teacher, but I realized, due to a number of circumstances, that the education system in the US just doesn’t support teachers in the way that they should be. So not only would I be not making nearly as much money as I would in marketing, which is where I ended up, but I also would end up just not making a difference in a meaningful way. And so, ironically, now a lot of my job is teaching. I teach marketing, I have a number of courses, I travel the world sharing knowledge, but it’s nice to be able to teach and do it according to what is effective, as opposed to having the strict rules of what you can and can’t teach.

Kevin King:

So you’re there right when some major changes were happening in the SEO space so 2008, 2009, I think is what you said. That’s right when a lot of people were put out of business like almost overnight. And then it happened again in the about 10 years ago, where Google would just come in and just make these sweeping changes on how everybody was ranking and what was working, and that was pretty devastating for a lot of people.

Navah:

It was, and one of the reasons I transitioned out of SEO for a little while and actually started a failed nonprofit to help ironically, back in education it’s called Angel Ed to make students as employable and debt-free as possible. I could not square the ethics of SEO at the time. There was a lot of very shady SEO during that period. And I just I could not continue down that path. Now, that’s not to say that SEO is shady, that’s not to say that there aren’t some amazing, amazing tactics, but just for me, I couldn’t feel comfortable there. So that’s why I transitioned to work on my nonprofit while doing PPC on the side, and eventually I found my way to start working for software companies. So I worked for WordStream for a while about five and a half years. I then did some work for some CRO companies, some more ad tech companies, and now I’m finally at Optimizer, which is nice, because Optimizer’s value is that it doesn’t force any particular strategy on its practitioners. It will help you do the work that you need to do, but it’s not forcing any particular strategy, and I think that that’s one thing that I wish more ad tech would do.

Navah:

When we think about the PPC or SEO conversation, there’s a lot of strategies that get baked into ad tech and there’s a lot of strategies that get baked into agencies, because one person figured out something that worked maybe five years ago, 10 years ago, and it doesn’t leave a lot of room for innovation. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for how the ad platforms evolve. So when we think about today and the current landscape and the environment we have today. What’s nice is that there seems to be much more transparency about what data is available from third parties, that third parties can come in and be those heroes. So that is kind of like my long-winded answer of how I got from SEO to PPC is basically just trying to do the most good for the most people while still being profitable.

Kevin King:

So AI? There’s a lot of people in the SEO industry, I think it’s like a $91 billion a year industry is what I last read that are really worried that AI is going to decimate it and that what are your? And there’s other people like, nah, it’s no big deal, but I’m starting to see some of what Google’s playing around with and what they’ve been testing, and I think decimating is an actual, proper term because it’s the gamemanship. A lot of that is going to go away.

Navah:

I could not both agree and disagree, depending on which parts of AI and which function job functions we’re talking about. So I do think that there’s a series of tasks that are about to be decimated that AI will pick up. I also suspect that there’s a whole number of new careers that are going to have AI hardwired into their DNA, that are going to come onto the marketplace. So I don’t think that SEO is dead by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t think that AI is coming for your jobs, but I do think that there is a real dumbing down of the internet that has come about because people are leaning too much into AI to fix problems rather than applying that human critical thinking first. I don’t know if you have any artists in your life, but I’m actually, I’m married to an artist and it’s fascinating hearing his perspective on AI, because I think they’re the ones that are even more at risk for AI coming for their jobs. But what’s interesting is that even Google is saying they need to hire content creators to teach the AI system so that it can actually produce good content, because at the current moment, AI cannot exist without the human. It needs the human support, the human guidance, and until such time that the AI doesn’t need that guidance, there’s still going to be jobs abound.

Navah:

But I do think that there’s also an important distinction between AI the function of creating resources, and AI serving information. So AI overviews totally agree. It’s not great for SEO, whether we talk about Copilot and ChatGPT and being found there. If you’re okay with not having the traffic come to your site when you get the business anyway, which is totally fair go get indexed on Bing so that you show up for ChatGPT. So it depends on what part of AI we’re talking about to determine whether the jobs are getting decimated or everything is hunky-dory.

Kevin King:                                                                                  

Well, I agree with you on the artist side. I mean, like photographers, a lot of people are saying, well, there goes Mid Journey and Dolly and all this, you don’t need photographers anymore. I was like, no, you actually do. Can you put in a prompt and get some images back? Yeah, you can, but it’s in a little box, I mean, there’s no soul to it. And I think where a lot of people in the creative space, instead of being worried, they should be more excited, because now they’re like holy cow, I know how to do lighting, I know how to do textures, I know how to do emotion in my art and I know how to do all this. Now I have the tools that can actually do what I want to do. It’s kind of like George Lucas when he put out the first Star Wars back in 1977. The technology wasn’t there for him to make the ships fly like he wanted and make all the little special effects. So 20 years was it? 20 years later, he came back with the Star Wars whatever they called it, uh, the updated edition that there’s a name for it—

Navah:

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin King:

Where he actually could go back and actually like this is how I want job of the hook to look or this is how I want. It’s the same thing with artists. Now with AI. I think they’re looking at it. It’s like shoot, now I can actually do, I can create, because I know how to tell it what focal length to put and how to tell it what shutter speed to do and all this kind of stuff, and I think that’s where people need to be thinking about it from, as a tool.

Navah:

And this is. It speaks to Amazon’s investment in AI, the AI images for sponsored display. A little bit sponsored video I’m waiting for in a serious way, but sponsored display and also sponsored products there’s some really interesting innovations there. One thing that I’m curious to see and this is something as a Google first marketer I’m particularly curious is, are Amazon sellers as wary or as cautious about using AI functionality within Amazon as Google first marketers are? Google first marketers love to clutch their pearls about brand safety guidelines, about oh, it’s not really so great, but if the creative gets the engagement, if the creative gets the sale, do we really care that it’s a smidge off brand guideline, not violating it, but just one or two colors off? To me, I personally don’t care, but I’m a pragmatist. I’m curious from your perspective, do you see Amazon advertisers maybe being a little bit more hospitable to AI?

Kevin King:

Yeah, I think a lot of them don’t quite understand it completely. I think a lot of them are willing to accept. You know, Sora just recently came out and there’s a lot of, there’s some other Chinese tools that could do some pretty amazing stuff. And I know, I think with AI, with A plus content, right now Amazon’s doing some testing with some video stuff and I think people will play with it. But is it going to be on brand, like you said and match perfectly? Probably not initially, but, like you said, do they really care? I think the big brands care your Nikes and Adidas or Adidas those guys, they actually care, but the average three-piece seller that’s just trying to make a buck and is probably not going to care too much. And but what I think is you’re going to start getting a lot of sameness—

Navah:

Yes.

Kevin King:

And you’re going to get a lot of the, the creative and the soul is going to disappear and you’re going to start seeing a lot of very similar things, just like in ChatGPT, it uses a lot of similar wording to start, you know dictionary not these big long dictionary words, but these phrases that you start seeing patterns over and over and over—

Navah:

Yep.

Kevin King:

And you start seeing that with people that are using Amazon’s AI to generate their videos and their ad content and stuff. I think right now you might have an advantage, but that’s going to quickly go away.

Navah:

So what I’m curious to see is will consumers care about the sameness? So I had a really fascinating experience.

Kevin King:

I don’t know if they’ll care, but you might, because you need to stand out.

Navah:

Right. Well, where I was going with this is, ironically, not a seller mechanic, but actually a local service one which, for anyone that isn’t aware, Amazon’s local service. Non-seller ads are amazing. I’ll shamelessly plug them because they’re lovely. I had a gas leak in my house yesterday. It was terrible. Like my whole workday got thrown into a tizzy and rather than caring about the ad creative, rather than caring about the number of reviews or the what star rating, I just went down the list and just started calling until someone picked up and came to my house and fixed my gas. That is, I think, a really important lesson we as marketers have to understand is that it’s even if you are not the most creative, even if you are not the most perfect, if you’re there and you’ll deliver when it’s needed, and if you’re ranking as you need to be there you go. And that’s where I totally understand that some folks might feel wary about putting so much money into Amazon PPC versus other channels, because, hey, you know what you need to save your margins where you can, but just to get the ranking so that you’re present and you’re there when you need to be is the most important thing. So I’m a little bit more forgiving of sameness. I’m a little bit more forgiving of boring when you follow it up with, I’m in stock and I’m doing the pragmatic steps.

Kevin King:

When you can solve the problem that someone has an immediate, they need an immediate solution too.

Navah:

Exactly.

Kevin King:

It’s kind of like the old way, in the old days of the yellow pages people would, because people would start doing exactly what you just go down the list and so they. It would be AAA plumbing and then ABC plumbing. He comes after AAA plumbing because it’s alphabetical. So some other guy would have four A’s, so he comes first. It’s the same thing as being when you got a problem. All you don’t care as much as they can solve the problem. Come. You don’t care as much about reviews or about how pretty is their video or how good their ad was on the news or whatever. It’s just like come, fix my problem and fix it now, as I’m going crazy over here. That’s what matters in being present, like you said, and you never know when that’s going to occur. So you got to keep advertising. You think about when Amazon first came out, nobody knew who Amazon was, and I remember in the 90s 95, 96 maybe they had billboards all over Austin. I live in Austin, Texas, so driving down the freeway big billboards for Amazon and I’m like what is this Amazon thing? And now it’s it’s. They still do a little bit of outdoor out advertising, but not near to the extent because they don’t. They don’t need to, but they had to be there and then they became like now they’re the default. That’s where you go if you need something. They positioned in the consumer’s mind, so they’re there, and so I think, when it comes to PPC and advertising, that’s where a lot of people are always looking for that instant ROI. And you don’t know, was it that SEO blog that actually drove the sale, or was it the ad on Facebook? Or was it the ad that you ran on Amazon? Or maybe it’s a combination of all three, but only one of them got the attribution. And so you’re not sure.

Navah:

So there’s an even more complicated layer to this and I apologize if this is getting a little nitty gritty, but it’s an important point. You know how Amazon requires Amazon to have the best price. There is a really stupid update that happened, where Google can apply automatic discounts to your products to help you rank better and to, like, generate more sales. And if you accidentally opted into that within your Google Merchant Center, next, you might accidentally violate Amazon terms of service. So if Amazon is a big part of your business and you have the automated discounts going, you could accidentally pull yourself out of the ranking through no intentional fault of your own. So it’s not just about being present and not just about showing up. It’s also about being aware of the rules of engagement, of what’s happening with each of the platforms and how do they play together. This is especially important when rules of engagement can conflict. So Amazon, I wish, gave advertisers or brands I should say sellers more grace when it comes to this, because sometimes there are accidents where you don’t intentionally have that lower price somewhere else. But just so that folks are aware, there’s a lot of automatic settings in all the app platforms right now and it can be very easy to kind of set it and just let it ride and just focus on the analytics. You want to make sure that at least once a quarter you’re checking your settings, you’re checking the inner workings of each of the campaign types, because if you don’t, it doesn’t matter that you have the best creative or it doesn’t matter that you are a long established brand. Life is going to happen. So I apologize if that was a technical tangent.

Kevin King:

No, that’s interesting. It’s a good point. Amazon makes up their own rules too. Temu is excluded. Temu is like oh, you’re selling something on Temu, oh, we don’t count them, they don’t apply in our low price. That’s a different kind of thing. So they make up their own rules as they go along, but you got to stay on top of those to know how to play. When it comes to Amazon, a lot of people know a lot of the familiar Amazon tools of keyword research, the Helium 10s, the Jungle Scouts, all those guys. They know some of the software companies and the agencies, but there’s a lot of stuff out there. You come in from the SEO world that a lot of people get in this little Amazon fishbowl and all they know is these little tools that everybody’s talking about on LinkedIn or social media. That’s in the space and that’s all they know. But there’s a whole another world out there of tools and resources and strategies that comes from the SEO and the internet marketing world that a lot of people have no clue of. Like tools, like I know you, like you do some writing and stuff for like SEM rush and a few other websites. Can you talk about? Yeah, yeah, can you, yeah, can you talk about a little bit about how the approach is slightly different or how those can complement what people might be doing when they’re just focused on Amazon?

Navah:

Yeah. So one of the most important ways to think about Amazon first versus, say, Google first or Microsoft first or paid social first, is it’s like Superman and Bizarro or Deadpool and Deathstroke they look similar, the feel is the same, but they’re just slightly off, or there’s like something slightly not quite correct if you were to translate it over. So, for example, one of the main rules of engagement in Amazon is that you need to do PPC to help with your organic ranking. You need to build those both in and then eventually you can start to pull PPC back and you leave that alone. Organic search, organic Google and then PPC Google ads. Whichever Google ads you’re using, they have no interconnectivity when it comes to ranking. Your ranking on Google is completely on its own from your paid efforts. Now there are things that your paid team could ask for that could hurt your organic rankings and there are things that your organic team could ask for that could hurt your PPC performance, but the interconnectivity of the two of them as a single channel is not the same. The other thing that’s really important to remember is that in PPC, there’s a lot of contradiction, whether you want people converting on the SERP or effectively the equivalent would be on Amazon versus owned traffic. Amazon is going to kind of penalize you in a certain way for pushing people too much to your own site because they want to own that revenue. They want to own that traffic. On the PPC side, on the SEO side, the whole point is to drive people to those owned experiences where you can then provide all that amazing information. So you just want to be mindful of those rules of engagement.

Navah:

The other thing I’ll point out is that when it comes to attribution and tracking, Amazon is used to owning that data. It’s very clear. The sale happened here. This is our data. All that user behavior. It’s kind of our fishbowl. When you look at any other platform, there’s a lot more questions about where did the conversion come from? Who is this group? Are we allowed to know what they searched? Because of privacy concerns, are we allowed to know all those different conversion pieces? So there’s a number of different technical difficulties there. But the biggest thing I’ll say about PPC and SEO versus Amazon and I don’t know why we think of them differently is just that the naming schemes and the metrics are slightly different. So when we think about return on ad spend. That is the major metric in most channels. TACoS is the main metric for Amazon and just acknowledging that you can’t perfectly translate Amazon metrics to Google and Google’s metrics perfectly to Amazon without going through a little bit of a reorganization.

Kevin King:

There’s some people, do you know John Moran?

Navah:

Yeah.

Kevin King:

He’s actually speaking in my event in Iceland, Elevate 360 in Iceland in April. But a lot of people consider him one of the bigger thought leaders on when it comes to Google ads and stuff, and one of the things that he’s always saying is that you can’t trust the reporting on some of these big platforms like Google and stuff, because it’s all slanted to what’s in their best interest, not what’s in your best interest. Do you have any experience with that? He’s like if you’re just going by strictly TACoS or ROAS or something like that it could be you can be misled by the data if you don’t have the whole picture. He’s got some big system of like knowing how to tie in the Facebook data to the Google data, to the Amazon data.

Navah:

I’ve seen, I’ve seen—

Kevin King:

It’s pretty complicated, but it’s pretty fascinating. I don’t. I don’t know how to explain it properly here, uh, but he’s like if you really need to know this to actually make real decisions on what, because what Google just shows you in their console is not can be misleading, because it’s in their interest to what to show you, not in what’s your interest of what’s what.

Navah:

So here’s how I would look at Google ads data, Amazon data, LinkedIn data, Metadata, analytics data all the data sets from anywhere. It’s the same as looking at a nutritional label on some food that you buy in the store. Do you perfectly trust that the calorie information is absolutely correct? Maybe, maybe you don’t. There was actually a suit several years back where someone claimed that they were worth only one point on the Weight Watchers scale and it was actually worth seven points and a whole bunch of women got really mad that the ice cream that they could eat. The whole thing is now like no, that was like my whole day is worth the food. When we look at any metrics, there is a certain amount of leap of faith that we take when we accept any numbers from anybody and what you have to decide is what protections do you have in place to protect your business when looking at those numbers? So I’m a little bit less cynical and pessimistic than John. I’ve seen a lot of his tests. I think that they’re really interesting tests. My take on it is yes, be skeptical of all data, of all numbers that you see. Pull them in and do your own analysis to confirm. Do does your revenue line up with what you were being told? And if the answer is consistently 10 to 15% off, then you know to apply that 10 to 15% off to that channel moving forward. But I don’t think it’s reasonable for us as marketers to say we don’t trust any numbers, because then we can’t make any decisions and it’s far more useful to know. Okay, this platform is telling me I am seeing consistently a 300x return on my ad spend at this budget. My own reporting says that it’s closer to 150. And that’s because of all the margins and overhead. Have I taken the time to upload my offline conversions and my profit numbers to the ad platform. Do I trust the ad platform enough to have those numbers and not price gouge me Like there’s a whole number of questions there, but the conversation begins with have I given the platform enough information to give me data back that I can trust? The answer is no, then take the data as an estimate, not a hard fact.

Navah:

The second is if you do give it the information, do you trust your own information? There are many times when I go through with clients actually checking the order processing system where it’ll look like someone made a purchase but then the orders don’t actually make it into the system so no one knows to send out the product. Or someone calls and it looks like they made appointments but they only made one, but it looks like they scheduled three. There’s a number of times where your own data can be corrupted. So it’s not reasonable to say the ad platforms, the networks, are lying to us without taking stock of our own data. But if you’ve taken stock of your own data and you’re regularly comparing it to the platforms, you should see a regular delta or difference between what is being reported and what your actual outcomes are and you can just run with that and make intelligent decisions If you’re not doing that work, then I highly suggest that you do it.

Kevin King:

And don’t forget if you haven’t signed up yet for my newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com,  BillionDollarSellers.com. Every Monday and Thursday, a brand new one coming out, and I also have a think tank coming up the end of next month, end of February, February 20th to the 24th in Austin, Texas. You can find out more information about that, as well as my event in Iceland that some of the people from Helium 10 will be at as well, that’s in April. Go to BillionDollarSellerSummit.com. Billiondollarsellersummit.com to find out all about that.

Kevin King:

When someone’s new to advertising, whether it be on Amazon or on Google or something, what are some big faux pas that you see over and over and over that people make? Is it cutting the ads too soon? Is it not knowing how to actually read the numbers? Is it knowing not how to actually do the proper testing? What do you see? That is just like dang it man. Here we go again. Can’t these people just get this right?

Navah:

So the biggest one is what we were actually just talking about is conversion tracking efficacy. I think not enough people invest the time to make sure that their conversion tracking is set up correctly and that they aren’t double or triple, quadruple counting conversions.

Kevin King:

What’s set up correctly, I mean, is that you’re talking about all UTM parameters and all the cross. What do you?

Navah:

So there’s a couple of pitfalls. Pitfall number one, at least on the Google side, is primary versus secondary conversions. A primary conversion will actually track into reporting and will be a weight in the bidding. A secondary one will just be counted but it won’t actually impact anything. A primary is something that actually will be counted by the ad platform, specifically Google. Microsoft, I think, also has primary and secondary, where it actually will be reported in your reporting and it will factor into how the ad platform bids for future people seeing your ad. Secondary, it will not impact your reporting, it will not impact the algorithm, so it’s just something that you’re seeing but it’s not actually impacting anything. So what oftentimes will happen is that people will have too many conversion actions as primary, so one sale ends up counting three times because the add to cart was added as a primary.

Kevin King:

Oh, I see what you’re saying. So each individual action is assigned a primary or secondary.

Navah:

Right, correct.

Kevin King:

Okay, so they signed up for the newsletter list, someone might have that as a primary as one of their goals and also they made a purchase. That’s also a primary. So it’s not segmented properly based on what the action they actually took, because there’s overlapping.

Navah:

Exactly, exactly, and so.

Keving King:

I got you now. Okay, okay.

Navah:

And that can be very bad, because then you have your budget going to something that didn’t actually drive as much value as it should have. So that’s one thing. The other potential issue are the human errors, where you have your landing page just not firing correctly, like it just doesn’t convert to a thank you page, it doesn’t submit the form, it doesn’t know. On Amazon this is different, because obviously Amazon is not going to have purchases not happen. But you might have something on your own internal systems where the order comes in but it doesn’t process or doesn’t alert you, and then you end up spending money in a useful way but then you didn’t really make the sale and then everyone’s upset and then Amazon gets upset with you because you didn’t send out the product. So it’s making sure that your internal systems are set up correctly.

Navah:

I do want to make sure I touch on one other element, though that can sometimes be set up incorrectly. A lot of people complain about invalid clicks, when what they really should be checking is their location targeting and whether they have set to target people in a specific location versus showing interest in a specific location. The most common reason for clicks from countries that you did not target or did not intend to target is because you allowed for, showed interest in, and then it blows up your budget. This is very common when you enable things on the Google side like search partners and search display expansion, but it’s a very common mistake. Just make sure that you have that set. I also see a lot of people complain about brand cannibalization and waste, but then they don’t take the time to set up exclusions like negative keywords, brand exclusions, placement exclusions for those bad placements. So, all in all, a lot of mistakes or turn into the ad platform is ripping me off and I agree 100% that ad platforms should make it easier to understand when you’re making a certain choice. But we do also need to take accountability. If we don’t take the time to set exclusions, to set meaningful conversion actions, to set meaningful targets, it’s hard for the app platform to deliver value.

Kevin King:

What do you think about all these automated tools that are basically they call them AI, but they’re really mostly just algorithms. But they’ll sell it as an AI because that’s the hot thing to do right now. But they’re just almost like this they’re set and forget it, but they tell you oh, we’re monitoring it, we have someone checking in on it. But what are your thoughts on those?

Navah:

So I have a bunch of feelings because I I’ve lived in software now for almost 10 years, uh, and it is very important that a software is not a hallway pass for set it and forget it. There is no such thing as set it and forget it. Um, now, I’m not sure if you’re talking about PMACs or if you’re talking about third party tools or if you’re talking about other campaign types, but my generic answer to this is we started off this conversation talking about AI and how humans need to be involved with AI. Any vendor that says I have these scripts running, so I don’t need to do any work is a vendor you should not work with. Scripts can be really good to save you time and there are absolutely valid amazing uses for scripts, but that doesn’t mean you ignore it. You want to at least check your change history once a week, if not once week, a once a month, to see what manual, active, human changes were made versus automated changes. Typically, an automated change is an IP exclusion. It might be bid adjustments or budget changes, campaign status changes. Human changes are typically going to be creative changes. If certain negatives were added, certain keywords were added, if you made any changes to descriptions, it’s a little creative and just you want to make sure that there is some degree of mix. Now Helium 10, Optimizer, Sky Fluency, like there’s a whole number of amazing tools out there that are helpful to work in tandem with the human. Working with a tool doesn’t mean you get to get a pass, though, like you need to work with the tool to achieve better results than you would have on your own, whether that’s through intelligence, whether that’s through automation, but it could even be for reporting, just making life easier for you for reporting, but you still need to be present in the conversation.

Kevin King:

What about the people that are like this? All sounds cool, but this is just giving me a headache, thinking about all these numbers and all this reporting and all this analysis. I’m just going to go hire someone to do this, whether it’s either someone on staff and bring them in internally, or hire an agency. What are some things that people should look for as a seller, an e-commerce seller? What should they be looking for? How do they make the right decision on where to go, because you see people bounce around from person to person to person or agency to agency to agency. What are some things that you would recommend, if you’re in that spot, that you should be using in your analysis?

Navah:

For sure. So I will shamelessly plug Robin Johnson and Nate Johnson over at Marketplace Blue. They are amazing. If you do need a vendor, go check them out. They are lovely. In terms of the non-shameless plugs. The first question you want to ask any vendor is, if you’re hiring externally versus bring someone internally is am I going to own all of my assets? Am I going to own all of my accounts. I cannot get over the fact that in 2024, we are still living with people having their ad accounts or their Amazon accounts or whatever, held hostage by agencies that say well, it’s my proprietary process, it’s my ad account. If you want to leave, you need to start over from scratch. That’s not ethical. It’s not good. Don’t say yes to anyone who says that. The other consideration is are you going to pay a flat monthly fee? Are you going to pay a percentage of sales? Are you going to pay a percentage of spend? In today’s world, most vendors offer flat rate fees and you might have a higher percentage of spend versus lower percentage of spend based off of that flat fee, but the flat fee is usually the most comfortable, stable partnership. The risk of signing on with someone that is a percentage of spend is that there is always going to be that nagging thought in the back of your mind how much are we spending more just so that you can make more off of working with me? Because that is a real risk.

Kevin King:

That’s the old ad model from Masson Avenue is you place an ad on NBC, you get 15% of the cost of the ad. That’s how they got paid. So that model is still ingrained in a lot of people and it’s shifting now. But yeah, go ahead.

Navah:

Well, and it’s interesting because it used to be accepted as a given that that is just what people would do. But I think as more and more people are shifting online, there’s more transparency into results, and so it becomes harder to justify a big spike in spend if the results aren’t there. And so that’s where you get those questions about how reliable is this? The final again, that final model is the percentage of revenue or sales. I personally don’t like this model because it makes it a very high risk, high reward relationship. So if everything goes great and everyone is making money, it’s lovely. But if things are not going great, it can be very contentious because then you might feel like you’re doing a ton of work and not getting paid a ton because sales just aren’t happening, and there could be a number of reasons for that. And if you’re the seller you could be struggling. It’s like man, I will pay you if you bring me sales, but why aren’t there sales? And it just it can implode. So if you’re willing to roll the dice with that, it’s okay, but I personally like the safest model is just a flat rate fee for services rendered.

Navah:

The final consideration and this applies to hiring versus or hiring and an agency. I like to ask anyone I’m going to work with what is their favorite innovation from the past six months? And the reason I like that question is because it, A will tell me what someone’s interested in, but also tell me how clued in are they to what’s going on? Because if you’re paying to not have to think about it, you want to make sure that whoever you’re going to work with is thinking about it and is going to proactively be on top of all of these things and keep you in a great spot, so that you don’t have to go tell them hey, I read this. Are we doing this? If not, why not? Like what’s going on? Like you shouldn’t have to think anymore when you hire somebody or when you pay a vendor, about these specific problems. You should be thinking about larger scale problems, like the big strategic problems, and if you have to dedicate that bandwidth, then the person’s not pulling their weight.

Kevin King:

You mentioned it earlier about everything’s moving towards this performance-based ROI or ROAS TACoS, where I’m going to spend some money. I want to get a specific return back. What about old school just branding? What about just advertising just to create awareness? The old Coca-Cola Super Bowl ads and there’s no direct correlation. I mean they’re actually getting to the point where they can actually do something, but there’s no direct correlation. Like you spent $7 million on a Super Bowl ad, next month in a Super Bowl ad, sales are going to go up $22 million. I mean they’ll come back and say, well, we had a good quarter. Sales were up 3% overall. It must be because of the Super Bowl, but they can’t directly attribute that a lot of times. What do you think about that kind of advertising versus the very performance-based advertising?

Navah:

I love that type of marketing. I love that type of advertising. There was one really big red flag video. People are terrified of making video creative, either because they don’t feel comfortable with their own skills or they don’t want to deal with the project management of getting it done externally. I mean, Amazon is pushing very aggressively their video offerings and people are thriving when they can take advantage of it, but they’re still putting so many different incentives out there because people are not leaning into them. So I think it’s not that there isn’t appetite for brand-oriented marketing. I think the issue is that people are so afraid of video and it’s why video remains one of the greatest opportunities available, whether it’s performance or brand marketing, because people just aren’t there and the brands that do take advantage of video see huge return. You’re able to take pennies on the dollar placements and there is transactional intent there that you can take advantage of and you can build lists off of people engaging with your videos. So, I don’t think it’s that people are afraid to invest in brand. I think people are afraid to invest in video and that happens to be the easiest way to do brand advertising right now.

Navah:

The only exception to this is influencer marketing. I think influencer marketing is kind of a way around it, because you basically offload the video to somebody else to produce, and I think that’s a really big investment opportunity for a lot of folks. Now, with TikTok going kind of sideways in the States, it’ll be interesting for Amazon sellers that have an international play, because TikTok is not slowing down in Europe, and so for those of you that do sell internationally and are able to support the EU in your efforts, there’s a very big opportunity to also partner with TikTok, because Amazon did do all those great synergies with TikTok for that one click shopping and with TikTok shop. But yeah, I definitely think brand is amazing. It’s just that people are afraid of video.

Kevin King:

So, are you seeing good people that are advertising on like Prime, where you can now run videos on like different Prime shows?

Navah:

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin King:

You see Hulu and Roku and all these guys that are doing all these like video placements, and sometimes I’ll see, I’ll be watching, I’ll see a slick ad from Cadillac and the next ad is like this is some guy that just it’s some basic little ad, but he’s buying a little spot in there, but it’s working because you see them. They’re coming back over and over. So you’re seeing, there’s massive opportunity in that right now and a lot of that is working really well at a low cost.

Navah:

And not only that. I sat next to an advertiser that went from investing 5 million annually to 45 million annually for Amazon Prime because of the ROAS that he saw on that investment. It was staggering to me that not only did he see that opportunity, he was willing to do 9x the investment just because of how great it was. Now I will say that I am a nerd and a geek. You definitely can’t tell by my background. For those of you that are watching this on video, I actually have a subscription to Amazon Prime that allows for ads and one that doesn’t. I have a subscription to Netflix that allows for ads and one that doesn’t. I have one for Disney Plus, for Hulu, like I do all of them, because I like to see, like, what is the user experience?

Kevin King:

you probably have different Facebook feeds and different LinkedIn feeds. You only look at pets and one that you only look at dogs and one that you only look at something else, so you can see what they give you right?

Navah:

Yeah, I do actually. It’s fascinating to see these are, but what’s really interesting is that Amazon prime’s delivery of ads is actually, in my opinion, the best for transaction of all of them.

Kevin King:

Because you just hit on your remote. I’m watching NFL football on Thursday night football or whatever and it’ll pop up and it’ll say if you want more information on this, you don’t have to scan a QR code, it just says enter on your remote and they know how much if you flipped off of that commercial or if you watched it. They know if you hit the button. They know if you paused it and rewind it. They know all that information, which is super valuable.

Navah:

And what I don’t think enough people realize is that Amazon standards for ad inventory have dramatically lowered. They used to be way up here and it was really challenging to get into the rotation. But, as you said it’s, you have these big brands with their major production value and then you’ll have inky, dinky advertiser trying their best, living their best life, and it’ll do just as well because you benefit from that authentic advertising, that authentic branding—

Kevin King:

That social media type of feel, that UGC type of feel.

Navah:

Exactly so I. If people listening to this lovely rambling conversation take one thing away from it. Do not sleep on Amazon’s sponsored video offering. It is where they are putting a lot of their effort, their development effort into, and from a budget standpoint, it’s a lot easier to get ROI on because not enough people are leaning into it. So, you’re currently getting pennies on the dollar pricing.

Kevin King:

Have you done any testing with YouTube? Because YouTube is becoming more and more.

Navah:

Oh yeah, a ton of YouTube—

Kevin King:

More and more on big screen. I saw some statistic. I was at a podcast show or something or no a YouTube show and they were talking about how something like what was the number? 35% of all YouTube videos now are watched on like a 75-inch or bigger screen and a lot of people I think a lot of advertisers and a lot of us selling products don’t realize that we still think of it as you’re watching on your mobile device or you’re watching it maybe on your laptop and a little screen, but it’s becoming a major entertainment platform where people are watching long form entertainment, serialized entertainment, and the value that you can get in there of is crazy.

Navah:

There’s a handy dandy segment in Google ads. I apologize, I cut you off, but there’s a handy dandy segment in Google ads. It’ll actually show you the breakdown of what was the performance by desktop, mobile, tablet and then TV, and so you can see the TV performance and you can make choices with your creative. If you know that your creative is meant for mobile, just let it go to mobile. Or you can let it go everywhere if it’s designed to go everywhere. Just to quickly address because I know we’re probably coming up close to time. YouTube’s growth and YouTube’s value exponentially increased with PMAX. Pmax’s whole point was to help people get over their fear and to diversify their ad spend in a bias-free way.

Kevin King:

Can you explain what PMAX is for people that haven’t heard of that?

Navah:

Sure. So Performance Max basically aggregates all Google ad types into a single campaign where you give it a budget, you give it some rough suggestions about what you want. You exclude what you don’t want. You upload your creative and say put my budget where it’ll do the most good and it is eligible to serve on search, on shopping, on YouTube, on display, on local Gmail. Discover things like that.

Kevin King:

So it’s tapping into their entire database of data.

Navah:

And what’s really interesting is that a lot of people complained that they were being forced into YouTube spots with PMAX. But, ironically, even if it’s a mediocre ad, but you’re able to get the main points across, you’re still getting your name, the contact information or the product, all those pieces. And there’s another ad type that just got rolled into demand gen, which just focuses on YouTube, Gmail and Discover video action campaigns and those perform amazingly well where you basically it’s the same thing with Amazon, where you have the products right there and you take the action right from the video. Video campaigns are so powerful because so many people are afraid to just use video. But what you’re able to do with video campaigns is not only target in a really cheap and effective way, you’re also able to build lists and then target off of that viewership for your search campaigns. So, Microsoft has this, Google has this I don’t know if Amazon has it, but it’s an interesting thought of invest in video kind of like you brought up with the branding just to build that list so that you can be targeted and feel confident investing your more expensive search fund.

Kevin King:

There’s a big, it’s a hot topic in advertising right now too about it’s not not outdoor. I keep calling it outdoor, but there’s another name for it it’s. It’s non-traditional advertising. It’s basically like billboards and outdoor placements. There’s a name for it. I’m drawing a blank right now that a lot of people are saying that’s a major missed opportunity too. I don’t know about how the tracking and the attribution and all that stuff is on that, but you know what I’m talking about.

Navah:

I do so. One of the interesting things is, if you’re able to use call tracking as a conversion action, you can have attribution on almost anything because you can have what are called static numbers versus on-site numbers. So for anyone that isn’t familiar with how call tracking functions, you either will have a pool of numbers based off of the amount of engagement that is anticipated to happen, and it’ll change out based off of the source to that number.

Kevin King:

The information is used to do that. Different numbers in different markets, so they could track.

Navah:

Exactly. Or you have a static number assigned to a specific initiative. So, for example, local service ads, you’ll typically have one number per local service ad profile. If you’re doing a billboard, you have a number dedicated to the billboard and you’re able to then see how many calls happened from that source. You can usually listen to the call recordings. Sometimes there’s a transcription. You can have a rating of the call, things like that. But that also applies to content. So say, you put out an advertorial somewhere and you have a number to learn more. Because it’s a third party or it’s an affiliate deal, you put that number there and it’s a dedicated source that the only way that that could have happened is from that source.

Kevin King:

Have you played with geofencing at all?

Navah:

Yeah, so geofencing or location targeting is lovely and is beautiful. What a lot of people don’t realize is that and I mentioned it earlier the default is not the exact location you’ve targeted. The default is interest, and so it’s very easy for those geofences or location targeting to include people that you didn’t intend. And there’s a lot of really advanced kind of savvy settings that you can use, whether it’s things that are nearby. So, for example, say you want to target the airport people that are coming in as tourists. So you target nearby a particular airport with your ads running for whatever amount of time—

Kevin King:

Information desk or something.

Navah:

Yeah, exactly. But the other thing that’s important to note about location targeting or geofencing that is one of the areas where privacy is going to come into play, so you need to be very careful, depending on your, your industry, how much you opt into very specific location targeting or geofencing versus—

Kevin King:

Geofencing the strip clubs and uh, yeah, that’s a little privacy thing,

Navah:

Yeah well well, ironically there’s a new ad type out there for dating services, so who knows whether that’ll find its way.

Kevin King:

I know I’ve done geofencing and it’s interesting, I’ve tested it and I did it for a conference, for an Amazon Accelerate conference. Amazon Accelerate was 3,000 or 4,000 people, whatever it was in Seattle, and so I geofenced that conference to actually catch everybody that’s walking through there. And, yeah, I’m going to get a few people that are in the audience, the janitor and, you know, a couple of the workers or whatever they’re going to be passing through. But I got quite a bit of traffic off of that geofence. And then, after the geofence, I just I was like how can I keep retargeting these guys for like the next 30 days? Like well, the system I was using I think it’s a jam, it’s a system that’s like self-service. And they said just take the fence, because you draw a picture around where you want it to be the borders. And they just said, just draw really tiny, like maybe it’s a mop bucket, uh, you know, in the corner it’s really tiny, so maybe something passes through there, but not much. But that keeps it live, the campaign live, and you keep real target, keep targeting them for like the next whatever. And it’s pretty fascinating. I was like, man, you could do this If you’re selling sporting stuff, you know you’re selling for Texas A&M university and you just target a freaking football game where everybody’s there and wearing shirts and stuff and you could who knows.

Kevin King:

I mean there’s so many things out there. I mean I just had another podcast I do with a dorm for our called marketing Misfits, and we talk it’s not about Amazon or anything everything marketing. And we just had someone on recently. We were talking about postcard marketing and what all the cool stuff you can do with postcard marketing. Now, all the stuff, some of the AI, what you can do with customization, where you can actually go out and have AI. Someone did this for a campaign for press. They went out and they I’m just going to make up a product here. They’re launching a new dog leash and they want to know all the writers that have written about dog leashes or write about pets. And so they had AI go search the internet and found 1400 writers and beat writers and reporters that have written about pets. And then they went out and had the AI search everything that they’ve written about pets on the internet and then come back and make this customized email press release sent to each one of these individual reporters and saying hey, Kevin, we know you love dachshunds and you have this and this and this. We have a new product that your dachshund would probably love and it makes you feel like they researched you. You’re like holy cow, how they know all this stuff about me and the response rates are through the roof and there’s all kinds of really cool stuff you could do and I love geeking out about this, but unfortunately we’re basically almost out of time here. This has been great and I’ve been. I really love this conversation. If people want to find out more about you or follow you or reach out to you or get your help or learn more what’s the best way for them to do that.

Navah:

Again, my name is Navah Hopkins. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on Blue Sky. I’m always happy to help.

Kevin King:

Can you spell that for people that may not understand? Not know how to spell the person.

Navah:

Sure. So N, as in Nancy, A, as in Avalon, V as in Victor, A as in Avalon, H as in hospital. And then Hopkins is pretty straightforward H-O-P-K-I-N-S. And then again I’m on LinkedIn and Blue Sky and if you want to check out Optymzr, where I work, it’s optymzr.com. O-p-t-y-m-z-r.com. We have a PPC town hall. We have different studies and things that we’ll do. We do support Amazon. So if folks want to learn a little bit more about our offering, you can always check us out. But, most importantly, just happy to be here, happy to help.

Kevin King:

Well, I really appreciate you taking the time today and coming on. This has been great.

Navah:

Thank you so much for having me, and thank you again for being so understanding about me running late.

Kevin King:

No problem, it’s worth every bit of it. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Naval as much as I enjoyed recording it. It’s fun to actually do these episodes of the AM/PM Podcast. Just two people talking shop. There’s no preset questions, there’s no set agenda. We just sit down and see where it goes and you guys get to listen in and hopefully learn a lot along the way and be a little bit entertained from time to time. We’ll be back again next week with another awesome episode. I think we’re going to be talking about money. Yeah, everybody likes money, right? We’ll be talking about money next week. So I hope you join us. Make sure you hit that subscribe button, make sure you follow us on YouTube, follow this channel. If you like this episode with Navah, share it out there. Go ahead and forward this link and share it. But we’ll be back again next week with another awesome episode of the AM/PM Podcast. And before I leave you, I’ve got some words of wisdom. You know, it’s not about total sales that matter, it’s about leftover, not the turnover. It’s all about the leftover, not the turnover. See you again next week, take care.

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