The Math Behind PPC: Data-Driven Strategies for Amazon Success

Amazon advertising expert Mansour Norouzi, Director of Advertising at Incrementum Digital, shares his transformative journey from civil engineering in Iran to becoming a pivotal figure in the Amazon PPC space. Join us as Mansour unravels his unique experiences in Amazon PPC optimization strategies and his role at Incrementum Digital. He highlights the challenges of restricted U.S. travel and how these hurdles have shaped his career, emphasizing a strategic shift towards location independence and e-commerce.

We navigate the rapidly changing landscape of Amazon advertising, exploring how it has evolved to match, and sometimes surpass, the capabilities of giants like Google. Mansour dives into the advanced functionalities of the Amazon Marketing Cloud, a tool that grants advertisers an unprecedented level of customer interaction insights. This episode also addresses the transformative role of AI in marketing, balancing skepticism with the benefits of AI in streamlining tasks and enhancing client relations while underscoring the irreplaceable need for human strategic input.

Listeners will gain valuable insights into the intricacies of managing PPC campaigns, including common pitfalls and expert advice on optimizing budgets and campaign structures. Mansour candidly discusses the importance of maintaining a balanced organic and paid sales ratio, offering a roadmap for achieving sustainable growth. As a bonus, Mansour and Kevin also tease upcoming content from the Billion Dollar Seller Summit Iceland and an exciting future episode featuring Shivali Patel from Helium 10, ensuring our listeners stay ahead in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.

In episode 436 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Mansour discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon PPC Strategies With Mansour
• 06:43 – Scaling Supplement Brands Through Advertising
• 09:46 – Marketing Passion Project
• 11:24 – Evolving Amazon Advertising Strategies
• 15:44 – Amazon Marketing Cloud Audience Customization
• 25:28 – Future Impact of AI in Amazon PPC
• 30:26 – Generative AI Tools for Video Production
• 33:04 – AI Improving Agency Selection Process
• 35:25 – Amazon Advertising and Client Management
• 37:06 – Client Growth Incentives and Compensation
• 40:23 – Amazon Advertising Services and Brand Management
• 43:15 – Amazon PPC Campaign Optimization Strategies
• 50:58 – Grouping Keywords by Volume and Intent
• 54:45 – Kevin King’s Words Of Wisdom

Transcript:

Kevin King: 

Welcome to episode 436 of the AM/PM podcast. This week I’m speaking with Dream 100 member and BDSS Iceland speaker Mansour Norouzi. Mansour has an engineering background. He’s a math geek. He’s a massive content contributor to LinkedIn in our space, especially when it comes to PPC. So we talk about everything PPC, with some very specific strategies on how you can optimize your campaigns, what you might be doing wrong, how you can take a different look at some of the reports and everything in between. This is a great edition of the AM/PM podcast. Make sure you listen all the way to the end. Enjoy and learn a lot.  

Kevin King: 
Mr. Mansour Norouzi, welcome to the AM/PM podcast. How are you hanging, man?  

Mansour: 
I’m doing great. Thank you for having me, and it’s always fun and amazing to talk to you.  

Kevin King: 
You’re up in Canada, is that right?  

Mansour: 
Yes, I’m in Toronto. The weather is not as good as Austin.  

Kevin King: 

It’s true. That’s very true. I was up in Toronto last year what was that? July, I guess it was. I was in Montreal and my buddy, Norm Farrar, lives up just north of Toronto. I was up there visiting him. I’ve been up there in the winter. One time was enough. I’ll go back to Austin, where we don’t have this white stuff.  

Mansour: 

If you would love to see you another time here, maybe Toronto next time.  

Kevin King: 

You can’t go to the United States, though, right? Because you’re in, you have some so I– But I’m inviting you to come to something down here and you’re like I can’t, but because you’re originally from Iran, right? 

Mansour: 

Yeah, I’m from Iran. Honestly, this is something stupid that has happened. I have a Canadian citizenship, but I never like talk about this. But in Iran you have to go to military to get the passport, so it is mandatory to go to the military. If you don’t go to military, you can’t leave the country. So you got to go. And then the issue is that they randomly assigned you to different militaries in Iran. One of them is IRGC and IRGC Trump in 2019, put this in the terrorist list and anyone who was there even conscript passing our mandatory service. We are now inadmissible to enter to Canada, to US. So many Canadian-Iranian have this issue. We are hoping it gets solved. Maybe now that Trump is back, Trump is the person who could solve this.  

Kevin King: 

So you could come before 2019?  

Mansour: 

Yeah, from 2019.  

Kevin King: 

Oh okay. 

Mansour: 

Yeah, I traveled a few times. I went to Boston, New York, and first time I saw you in early 2019 in Austin for a mini chat, seminar or whatever it was the conversation 2019. I met you there for the first time, in Austin.  

Kevin King: 

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So you were traveling there, but you can travel to Iceland because you’re speaking at BDSS Iceland, coming up here in a little bit over a month.  

Mansour: 

Yeah, I traveled to Iceland and I have great land, great topic for there?  

Kevin King: 

Awesome. When did you get involved with this whole Amazon deal? Well, I’ve got to go a bit back.  

Mansour: 

Well, in 2015, I moved to Canada and I have a Master in Civil Engineering, so my background is in Engineering. Up till 2020, I was doing working as a construction manager, building custom fine homes, these luxury homes, and at some point I’m like I’m thinking like in next five years, do I see myself doing this? I like, I loved construction but at the same time, I didn’t love that location dependency. I love to being able to travel and don’t worry about working. If I’m working, it’s remote. I could work, but construction, of course, it’s not like that. You, when you move from one city to another, you can’t, because it is. You lose your connections, your networks, your people. Anyhow, I decided to start doing some researches and came up with Amazon selling on Amazon in mid 2018. I started learning mid 2018 from Helium 10, Freedom Ticket learned a lot from you was amazing, like pretty much everything I learned at the beginning was just from you, Kevin. I think I watched your videos for hours and hours with Freedom Ticket yeah, so I appreciate that I learned a lot from you.  

Mansour: 

Uh, so I started my first brand end of 2018, early 2019. I was selling a scratch off maps that if I go back, there is no way I would choose that product but I still have it. So I started with that brand. I’m selling in Canada with that brand and it’s kind of has become passive income, generating around mid low six figure, which is good. I’m pretty much passive. Then I went to these meetups, got to connect with some sellers. They were talking about Amazon advertising and I said, yeah, I’m doing my own Amazon advertising. Long story short, I did for a few of the clients or of people that now they are my clients. I went to Amazon advertising. By the time it was easy, if you are good at math, Amazon advertising 2019, every 2020, it was very easy because it was just math. So I was involved with that. I met Liron. Liron asked me to join the team at Incrementum Digital. I joined the team at the time, in 2020, we were, I would say, just 10 people. Now we are around 40, 50 people. I became Director of Advertising after a few months joining at Incrementum. Now I’m director and partner and we have a scale like we are managing around 60, 70 million per month for our clients. We have clients that generate– 

Kevin King: 

60, 70 million in advertising or 60 million in retail? 

Mansour: 

In advertising spent. We are managing 60, 70 million. 

Kevin King: 

Oh wow. 

Mansour: 

And, in terms of revenue, we have clients from a couple of millions per year up to we had, like some clients, we have some clients that 100, 200 million. Some of one of them is actually vendor central, so we have a very big range of the clients. And also this year, in 2020, long story short there 2022, I quit from my construction while I have just a single small brand that it doesn’t even generate me that much revenue. I’m like, I’m tired, I want to, I’m done with this, let’s move on from construction. So it works out. It worked out for me, fortunately, and this year I started also a supplement brand, which is pretty good. From end of January up to now, I got to around 500K in revenue, which I’m very happy for it. Yeah, I’m trying to scale that. My focus is to try to scale that, and that has been the story. But my every day is pretty much advertising, learning about advertising, talking about advertising, and there are so many things to learn.  

Kevin King: 

So you do a lot of experimenting, do you? Because you’re writing a whole lot on LinkedIn and putting out a lot of content? Is this stuff that you’re doing on your client’s account? Or do you use your, like personal accounts, a supplement brand and a maps brand to do some experimenting on, or where do you? Where do you find all this stuff?  

Mansour: 

I would say, actually that’s a great question because, uh, in our team even our team or some people on LinkedIn, they’re asking me how you come up with all these new things or new features, how do you see them? Because they think I’m just doing advertising. But the reason is that, since I’m a seller, I’m every day, every morning, I just go to my seller account to see what’s going on. If there’s any update, I go pretty much. I go to every single dashboard menu to see what’s going on. In terms of experiments, it is a combination of my own accounts and the clients that we work with, but I would say 70, 80% is my own account, 30% is the clients that we are doing and sometimes, of course, our team members doing changes. They are working. We get ideas from there as well.  

Kevin King: 

And you’re putting out on LinkedIn. You have a lot of followers. I mean, is that built up from your days as an engineer or did that really start when you started publishing content for Amazon sellers?  

Mansour:    

From my days from engineering, I have 500 connections, 500 followers. Pretty much it is for Amazon advertising and it started from when I posted about everything for Amazon advertising and I was really bad. English, as I mentioned, is my second language. I’m not that good in writing, but over time at least I improved. I learned how to write uh, and become better still not great, but to become better. AI now helps as well, but no, most of them pretty much all of them are from Amazon advertising. Uh, especially one thing that I guess accelerated that at a time what? That super template. I don’t know if you remember or not the search query performance and I came up with a template that also accelerated my growth of the followers, because I created this free template posted there and many people liked it, because search query performance is a great tool and it’s very difficult to work with, but I came up with a very easy template to work with.  

Kevin King: 

Were you originally posting just for yourself? Or were you posting originally on behalf of like Incrementum, just as a marketing thing that’s trying to help get clients? Because now you kind of mix it a lot of times. Sometimes you mention the agency you work for and other times you don’t mention it at all. So just what was the? Or is it just a passion project? You just like sharing stuff?  

Mansour: 

I love sharing. So if I want to say what is the main priority, what’s the main reason. For me? Generally, I love teaching and I love sharing. It gives me a joy every morning when I wake up and if I most of the time I put the time for it or something like, okay, I’ve got to share something, it’s just a joy that it’s like my best part of the day for me. I just like to share, with no expectation of are we going to get clients from this or not, and I think that’s the reason, like my audience are very engaging and I like that because I don’t, I’m not selling anything, I’m just posting and giving value that’s one. But before even Incrementum I started posting, I wasn’t that active, but then I joined Incrementum. First of all, well, I have access to more accounts, more experiments, we are seeing a broader range of clients and also now, when I started the supplement again, it gives me more content, more ways to communicate with people. So I would say it’s a combination of passion and, yeah, we are getting client from it as well, because they see our content, they see how our thought processes, they could trust us and they could reach out for audit and eventually, if we are a good fit, they will work with us as well. So it’s a marketing thing as well.  

Kevin King: 

You said that math and your engineering background is what fascinated you with PPC. So when you’re doing it for your maps and how did what did Leron see in you? When y’all met, they said hey, because you’re pretty new at that time. I mean, you’ve been, you hadn’t been doing a lot of PPC, what is he what? How did you convince him to say look, let me, uh, let me come on and I can help you guys out?  

Mansour: 

Great question, before talking to Liran from the period of yeah, I had my maps and when I was in the meetups. I got to connect with some sellers and I remember my first client, this guy, he’s my friend today. Actually, last week we went to Niagara Falls to meet up with a few of these people. He said Mansour, I have an issue with Amazon advertising. Who manages your Amazon advertising? What are you doing? I’m like I’m managing it. It’s pretty good, it’s easy for me. My issue is not Amazon advertising, it’s just a product that I’ve got to fix. He said okay, do you want to manage my ads? I’m like sure, Kevin, you can’t believe. I always tell this. I charge him 200 per month to manage his account. I’m like this is an experience. Let’s see what happens. So from there he was happy with me. He introduced me to another friend of his that he’s selling around like four or 5 million per month per year now and to this day he’s my client. I started managing an account. He’s happy, we are friends and I to this day, I’m still managing his account.  

Mansour: 

But during that period, I was posting on Facebook about advertising stuff like that. That is where Leron saw my post and actually he was looking for someone to help creating content as well and said okay, seems like you’re good in Amazon advertising, do you want to join us? We need ad manager also, someone that could help me with the content. I was like, yeah, sure, and it was a time period that I quit my construction management and I needed something to kind of balance that expense that I had, which I joined Incrementum and, honestly, Leron is great to work with. I love him. This guy is easy to work with and for us, we are kind of partner now as well. The reason I have been able to work with him is that I feel like we are working together, I’m not working for him. He’s a great guy, good to work with and Incrementum. What I love is that the people that we have in Corventon you know Kate, Kate is fun, fun to work with Brian, probably the CFO and COO. You haven’t met Brian. He’s mostly behind the scene, but the brain behind all of our processes and the whole team is great. Actually, in January 6 to 9 January, we’re going to Bahamas to have our annual meeting with Leron, Kate and Brian.  

Kevin King: 

So you started, took your first client I guess around 2019, when you were still selling, and then you joined Incrementum. You said 2022, is that right?  

Mansour: 

No, in 2019, I started my brand, the map brand.  

Kevin King: 

Oh okay.  

Mansour: 

And in 2020, right before COVID hits a month before COVID hits I quit my job. So by the time, I just have the map. I don’t have anything from 2020 that I don’t know if it was March or whatever until August or July. I get some clients for advertising as well. So after I quit, in 2022 to mid 2020, sorry, in 2020, I have the map and a few clients. In July 2020, I joined Incrementum. So, wow, 4 years.  

Kevin King: 

So what have you seen change since you started doing advertising in 2019? You said earlier it was really easy back then if you knew some math, but it’s gotten a lot more complicated and a lot more options. What are some of the big changes that you’ve seen evolve? Because I remember when I started doing PPC in like 2015, 2016, it was extremely basic and everybody was always saying, yeah, Google’s so much more sophisticated than Amazon, but Amazon one day will catch up, and I think Amazon’s pretty close to caught up and they might even be ahead on some of the stuff that they can do compared to Google. So what have you seen? What are some of the biggest things that came that you’re like this is freaking badass that you’re really rocking it with right now.  

Mansour: 

Something that is very new is we have heard a lot. It’s about Amazon Marketing Cloud, which takes everything to next level. So far, what we are able to do, Amazon first of all for anyone who doesn’t know what Amazon Marketing Cloud is is Amazon just gives you. There’s this data center that Amazon gives you every single event that you had interaction with the customer, if your ad got impression, if your ad got clicks, if your the customer add to cart. So you see every thing and you could query this, get these audiences, get insights from this, see the customer journey and stuff like that. So to this day, you are able to use that in DSP or just get inside see what’s happening. But now what they have released is that you can create audiences in Amazon Marketing Cloud and bring-  

Kevin King: 

You’re right, you can create your own audience. So it’s like a massive data pool and you can go in there and type in your own kind of prompts or say I only want, I don’t want these specific parameters, and it’ll go and like search and say okay, there’s this many people there in that audience.  

Mansour: 

Now, for instance, I’ll give you one example people who in the last seven days, they viewed the product detail page of my product, the product detail page, but they haven’t purchased. So create audience from these people. Or people who saw specific, who saw, they added, they added my product to cart. They haven’t purchased yet. So you can think any way to create this audience. It is limitless. It’s just your imagination and innovation, that how you think about it and what is the best for your product. So- 

Kevin King: 

It’s not just where you set prompts where there’s like five different choices, you can actually customize it to whatever you want to do.  

Mansour: 

You can customize. Amazon gives you some.  

Kevin King: 

If I’m a supplement maker, I can go in there and say I only want people who have bought from me five or more times in the last six months and they bought at least two bottles at a time, or I’m just making this up, or whatever. And it’ll give me an audience based on that. 

Mansour: 

It would give you an audience based on that.  

Kevin King: 

Okay. 

Mansour: 

Amazon gives you some ready to use queries. You can use that to create the audiences, but they have a query that you do from scratch right, you can’t query everything. For some people might be difficult, and even giving getting access to this day for just sellers it’s not easy. We could, because we have the access. We can create that. Or there are some, I feel, like platforms that you can connect and they give you AMC data, I think in 2025.  

Kevin King: 

What do you have to have to get it right now? You have to be an agency or you have to have special know somebody. It’s not, so it’s not open to everybody.  

Mansour: 

Up to last month, you could only have access to AMC if you were running DSP. Now they have opened up to everyone. In terms of if you are just running sponsored product, sponsored ads, you could get access to Amazon Marketing Cloud. So, in terms of directly for sellers, I think maybe if you have Amazon rep, you can connect and create, because it’s not an easy task. You need a developer or someone that knows how to do that so it’s not very easy. Maybe you could hire if you get Amazon gives you that access. I’m not sure if the sellers the house sellers directly could do that. To be honest, and I’m assuming Amazon in 2025 will make that easier to connect for all the sellers since opened up for sponsored ads. So, going back now what they have done you create this AMC. Before we could use these audiences from AMC only on DSP. Amazon has in sponsored product ads for now. When you go to the bid adjustments we had for top of search, rest of search product pages. Now you have one option on the top one tab for audiences. Now you have increased your bid adjustments for any specific segments from audiences that you have created in AMC. So any AMC audience you created you can see in your sponsor product campaigns.  

Mansour: 

I’ll give you one example. Let’s say you are selling a dog vitamin and you, from AMC, you create an audience ad people who have viewed my product but they haven’t purchased in seven days. Then they are searching for dog vitamin. Increase my bid for the dog vitamin keyword 20%, 50%. Or this way you could say that customers who are new to brand they haven’t purchased from me before, this is their first time purchasing from me, or they haven’t purchased anything from my brand they are more valuable for you, right? You want to acquire them. Other people might know your branding. If those customers are searching for dog vitamins, increase my bid for 10%, 20%, 100% or whatever it is. In 2025, Everyone telling me oh, Amazon, with this, Amazon is just going to drive the bids higher. And my response is yes, if you apply this on top of the campaigns that you have now, you’re going to drive your cost per click higher because you are adding multiplier on top of your existing campaigns, existing bids. But what you’ve got to do? You’ve got to rethink your structure. So you’ve got to create new campaigns, have a lower base bid for everything and start layering the audiences that how valuable they are, adding bid multiplier for those audiences so you’re not just adding 10%, 100% on top of your existing campaigns.  

Kevin King: 

So it’s not just my data right, I can target competitor stuff too right. I want to create an audience of people who, if I sell a slow feed dog bowl and I want to target people who are buying certain brands of dog food, because I know dogs wolf this kind of dog food down and it gives them indigestion and I want to target them with my slow feed dog. Well, can I do that with Amazon Marketing Cloud? 

Mansour: 

So far it is any interaction with your brand and product, could be impression. It could be impression. And even, here’s the thing, even if they search, they didn’t click but they have your ad is there, your organic product is there, you’re getting impression right. You can still see that audiences. But you can’t tell in AMC that anyone who saw my competitor in DSP you can create that and hopefully at some point Amazon says okay, even if you create in DSP, because in DSP you can target any competitor, saying customers who purchased my competitors they view they are subscribed and saved to my competitor. In DSP you can create that. I’m hoping in the future Amazon brings those audiences also to sponsored ads. And just a side note, the advertising side is free but to get the organic results, organic interaction, it is a paid feature $200 per month.  

Kevin King: 

That’s not bad to get that data.  

Mansour: 

So this is just one complexity that you mentioned. How complex and how sophisticated it’s getting.  

Kevin King: 

What’s on the horizon? What are they working on? That you’ve heard, that’s in beta, or maybe you’ve seen, or that you’ve heard that this is coming. That’s got you excited.  

Mansour: 

We just in advertising console we saw ads. You can create ads to the other platforms. So, like iHerb for instance I saw for one of our accounts which they are selling supplement, you can create ad that shows in the website iHerb as a sponsored ad. So it seems like they are working with different retailers to directly from advertising console, create ads.  

Kevin King: 

Probably ad networks that are on different, that these guys have different banner ad networks and stuff, and so they probably tie it into where you can actually advertise on those ad networks to bring it over to Amazon.  

Mansour: 

Yes, exactly, but so for now, with DSP, you could show display ads to those websites, but directly from advertising console, and I don’t know the format. Is it like sponsored product ads or is it a display? We don’t know. That is one that just I saw today. Actually, it’s very hot and it’s confidential, but I’m sure it’s not going to be confidential by the time this is coming up. The other thing is that I feel like 2025 will be about AI, about customization, so customization for the customers, customization for sellers and advertisers. What I mean by that is that, first of all, this audience that you see. You are seeing that how you are customizing right. From customer side, you have Rufus. Everything will be customized. The results that I am seeing with the results that you see will be different. Actually, this is happening right now. When I search for my product not the product name for the product I always see my product on the top, and the reason is because I purchased it once and it shows me organically number one as a seller. I love it because I’m like okay, if a customer purchased from me, I would love, every time when they are searching, to see my product on the top. For the customers, probably it’s going to be more customized right. You purchase this product before you interact with it, so I think customization would be the theme of 2025 for Amazon.  

Kevin King: 

So are you doing any AI stuff now behind the scenes? You know, I know, like some of the other agencies, like Ritu and some of those she’s built, all these like custom AI scripts and downloading the SQP reports and running them through, all these like specialized, highly custom stuff. Is it incremental? Are you guys doing anything like that and using AI in your back end for your management?  

Mansour: 

Yes, we have. We have tools for our team that they are using it. I have seen some of these AI tools that they are putting out there, but for me personally, they use cases that I see, I’m like this is not still as good as we want.  

Kevin King: 

I agree with you. There’s a lot of basic stuff that they’re just playing off of the buzz around AI. It’s really not even AI, it’s just an algorithm that they’re applying to it.  

Mansour: 

Exactly, and the thing is that this part is funny to extend some type. Sometimes I see they get to use AI to get that conclusion. I’m like I could just do this with a simple Google Sheet in a fraction of time that you are doing. Since you want to use the AI because of the buzz, you are doing this, it is great to start using it. But to use cases that we want we haven’t seen, and there are some that we are using, not necessarily advertising side in the team and how our team processes in communication. In the center, for instance, we have a bot that analyzes all our meetings with the clients for the transcript, the Slack messages, and we have this dashboard for our team leaders to understand is this client happy or not happy? What is the sentiment of the client? For us, for customer retention, that’s the best use case for AI because it goes over all the messages and says here is a happy customer, here’s unhappy customer. So we are alert that. Okay, let’s see what’s going on what’s the issue to try to solve it. 

Kevin King: 

So, what about AI though? A lot of agency owners out there are worried, or maybe not the agency owners, they’re actually happy about this, but the employees that work for agencies are like AI is just going to take my job. Um, we got 70 people working for us, like right now, like you guys do some of this AI, especially with robotics, where it can do, you can have little robots, AI robots and link them all together doing certain tasks like this is the sqp robot okay, go down. Its job is sq, download the sqb report, analyze, like this okay. Then it passes it off to another robot that does whatever the next step is. And another robot does okay, adjust the bids. And another robot. You can have all these guys working together doing the job that most of these humans are doing. So now you don’t need 70 employees at Incrementum, you need 15. And those 15, four or five of them are in the weeds getting their hands dirty and the rest of them are monitoring the robots and tweaking them. Do you see something like that as the future and where that’s going, or are you like? No, we’re always going to need. I know your employees probably a bunch of them are listening right now. They’re really sitting on the edge of their seat going what is he going to say? But are you going to need these 70 employees as this technology evolves and becomes more and more sophisticated?  

Mansour: 

That’s a very tough question and I feel like how long we are talking about next year. No, it’s not going to happen. In 10 years, probably, many things will be AI, but the way I think about this is— 

Kevin King: 

I think it’ll be sooner than 10 years.  

Mansour: 

Yeah, I think so. I think so. It will be much sooner the speed that it’s moving. But the way I think about this is that anything that needs strategy and strategic thinking, these tools are going to help you to speed up the process. So maybe they won’t be able to replace you completely, but they are going to help you to do the tasks you are doing faster and with more insights. For instance, all these image AI, image generation AI, image editing. They are not going to replace the people who are doing this. They are just going to help them to be better, to do the job faster. So it’s never–  

Kevin King: 

In that video example, if I use something like SOAR or one of these other Chinese tools or PIXA 2.0 or one of these other tools that are out there and I actually agree. Someone behind the scenes has to prompt it and tell it what to do. So they need to have a clue. Well, you’ve got 70 people that know how to do that, or a bunch of people in your company that know how to do that, so they go in there and they tell it what to do, and then it goes and does it, and maybe it’s not good enough and they tweak it. But then but and where it saves the time is they can knock this out, and what used to take them a week to do, now they can do in a day. So that means the other four days they’re twiddling their thumbs. Um, or your agency has grown so much where you’ve gotten so many more clients because you can do that. But if you haven’t, then you don’t need as many people because they can do in one day what used to take five, or in a one. One day, what used to take five people do in a week. So then four people lose their job because that one person can be more efficient. Um, and it still takes a human. I agree with you 100 percent. It still takes that human to give it that thought and that strategy. Um, but it takes less humans, uh it takes these robots work 24/7.  

Kevin King: 

They don’t need to take a nap. They don’t need to go to the movies, they don’t need to spend time with their family, so they’ll keep working over the weekend as well. So I agree, the human still needs to be there and the efficiency will go way up. But there’s still a gap there. You know, sora, for example, you don’t have the video editor anymore. That’s having to sit there and do everything. You have to go out. I just saw a tv. Uh thing is land rover. They just showed a. I just saw a piece that said that they just shot a commercial and they used some of these generative ai tools to do a lot of backgrounds because they need to show this car in different scenes, like on the ice and on the dirt and in the desert and whatever, and they were able to do it um with with ai and it saved them two weeks of shooting production time and having to go to all these different locations and all this different expense, and it looks just as good as if they were there.  

Kevin King: 

So what I’m just saying is that where this is going and the agency industry is an industry that’s going to be affected, I think, across the board, not just PPC agencies but any kind of agency out there. You look at call centers right now. Call centers in the Philippines 200 people answering the phone to do customer service is down to 10 people in a lot of cases, and some of these guys and it’s AI doing it. You look at back in right before Christmas, ChatGPT introduced where you could dial 800 number and actually call in and just talk to.  

Mansour: 

Or chat in WhatsApp.  

Kevin King: 

Yeah, chat in WhatsApp. It’s getting to that point. And then the AI can do a lot of bid optimization. You have certain rules and it can study the SQPs, it can study all these other reports and go this is what’s been happening for the last four years during the month of March, so we need to adjust. Or when is Easter? Oh, Easter’s in April this year. So what happened in march last year? We need to move that forward. It can make all these kind of adjustments based on your product and based on so I don’t know. I think there’s big changes coming.  

Mansour: 

I, I 100 percent, agree with you and it’s gonna. As you mentioned, it’s gonna happen eventually and like it is mind-blowing with what’s happening and I guess in in 2025, it’s even going to be even more Is that like you have this agent that you talked about. You have a manager agent that manages our specific task-oriented agents. Like you mentioned, there’s an agent for SQP. Go, download SQP and analyze it this way. Bring it back to me, which I’m an agent manager. Bring it back to me. This agent manager is going to give this information to the other one that, okay, you are doing advertising when you are optimizing bid, consider that this market share from SQP, consider that what’s happening, optimize based on that. 100%, it’s going to happen, but it’s very difficult. I don’t know when this will happen. I feel like it is very soon and it is inevitable. Yeah, it’s going to happen for many people, even me. Maybe next time I’m not here you’re talking with agent. I will be replaced as well.  

Kevin King: 

Yeah, I mean I always say with like agencies. People always ask me all the time like Kevin, who’s a good agency? I want a job on my PPC and I’m like man, there’s a lot of good companies out there but I can’t recommend you somebody. I can recommend you a person because at every agency and I’m sure this is probably the case at yours you have people of different levels, different skill sets, and I’m sure they’re all good people, but some of them are just a little bit better than the rest and it all depends on who you get right now as your agency. But with AI, you can basically create that perfect person and so everybody gets the bot. That’s the hero. Instead of when you get assigned an account manager, maybe you’re getting the person that just started three months ago and still kind of, they’re good, they’re a smart person, but they’re still learning a little bit, so they’re going to make it, make some goose. Or versus the person like you that’s been doing it five years, you’re like no, no, you need to be doing this, this, this and this. Don’t do that, don’t do that. This is going to waste money. I have all the experience.  

Kevin King: 

That makes a huge difference now when you, when people are out there booking agencies, I always hear people bouncing from agency to agency. It’s like, oh, that one’s no good. And then the next person will say, no, that was a really good agency. The next person is like no, they suck. And the next person is like no, they’re freaking awesome. They blew up my sales. So it’s all dependent there and I think some of the AI stuff is going to help with that. But what do you guys do at Incrementum now to actually, when someone comes in, go through some sort of special training program? Do you have like an internal PPC training program or are they an intern for a while, sitting there over the shoulder of somebody else, kind of watching and learning? Or do you only hire people that have experience or in some cases that’s good. Other cases you want someone that’s just good at math and good at analytical thinking and you train them up because they’re not corrupted by someone else’s thoughts or system. How do you guys approach that at Incrementum?  

Mansour: 

We have a very lengthy interviews and we don’t settle for less. There are, I would say, maybe from 50 people that we interview, one or two might be eligible for us and there are, honestly, there are so many people writing a resume. We have like nine years of experience in PPC. I’m like nine years. Nine years is a long time, like we didn’t even have nine years for advertising. But anyway, when we jump on a call to talk, we realize that, okay, they don’t know anything about that. But yeah, apart from that, that, actually use AI to filter some of these people and the people that they go. There are different layers on how we interview First people and the people that they go. There are different layers on how we interview first. Our team leaders interview them. If it is good, then it goes back to me. I am the last person to interview and say, okay, this person is good or not. But when they get in, yes, we have the whole training in place. They have to watch that and usually doesn’t matter if they are manager or their analyst. They start as a, as an analyst, working with a manager to get to know our processes, what we are doing, how we are working, all the details and then they shadow our managers. They shadow our managers for one, two months until we are very positive that they could handle they are good enough to handle the accounts, and after that they are getting accounts.  

Mansour: 

In terms of the clients, the way we look at it is that I wanted to say that we are very kind of difficult in terms of who we are hiring and initially it was difficult to get people in a few years ago to find people to interview, but nowadays people know us. They just go to our website and they apply for the job. In terms of the clients, then we get clients. First of all, we don’t hire everyone. We go over, we have an audit and we go over audit If there is nothing we could do anything. Going on, we’re like there’s nothing we could do. We are not going to hire you because just to get you as a client. If your agency or you are doing a good job like there’s, why would you join us? It has happened. We didn’t get the client because everything was good in the account and we said, okay, we can’t, we can’t improve your account. Then it’s after that. It depends on how complex, based on the complexity of the account. Spend of the accounts, number of ASINs, we decide who to assign from our managers that we have and our managers have analysts working with them. So we have manager, maybe one. In some cases we have two, three analysts working with one manager because of the amount of work that that client needs.  

Kevin King: 

Do you guys build in anything if one of your clients that you’ve helped sells their company. Maybe someone? I come to you and right now I’m doing a million dollars a year and because of Incrementum, you guys over the last say this was three years ago. Over the last three years now I’m at 5 million a year, and a lot of that’s because you guys really dialed in my advertising and helped me, showed me how to dial it in. Now I just sold my company for five million bucks. Do you guys do anything where you get a little piece of helping them grow, or is it just like a pat on the back and they send you a bottle of champagne? Or they say, thank you very much, that was nice. Uh, we’re not paying our last bill. Talk to the new person. What do they do?  

Mansour: 

We have examples of a few clients selling, or we had examples of clients variant on Amazon. Now they are with us and they are selling 20, 30 million per year on Amazon. And I would tell some Kevin, sometimes people take credit and talk post about this. We did this for this brand and it was all of us. I’m like, no, that’s not always advertising the product. The brand should be good. In this term, in regards to this brand that they are at 30 million, they are a good clothing brand that they are selling on their store, but they weren’t on Amazon. They came in, they have a great product and now we have that strategy and approach to help them. Since they have a good product, we could do that, and so they have some some brand searches as well. In terms of what we are getting from them, it is just them being happy and our fees pretty much. I would say that’s it. 

Kevin King: 

But a lot of times when you take on a new client, you have to do more than just manage their PPC. Right? I know Leron, back when he was partners with a couple other guys on a podcast. He was doing a podcast with them. They had a software tool that did all kinds of fancy image stuff, you know, and he did. I don’t know if that’s still around or not, but a lot of times when a client comes to you and they’re like, oh, my tacos are off or this last agency screwed everything up, do you guys do other things besides just managing PPC? Do you go into the listing and like, look, you need to change all these photos, you need to change the way the copy is. You’re missing this and this and this. Do you help them with that process or just advise them, or do you have a service that actually will do that for them, or how does that work?  

Mansour: 

Yes, well, actually that’s a great point. When they come on board, they want we do audit. Before coming on board, we do an audit and on our audit I would say I don’t know if you have seen our audit or not I would say that it’s one of the most comprehensive audit you would see from any agency, because we are not just doing audit for the advertising, we do audit for the listing A-plus content. Anything you mentioned here is your advertising issues that you need to figure out and here’s your listing. You’re listing your images showing this, but look at the competitor. We think you could do this. Of course, we don’t do that in audit for all the agents. We are doing for top hero products. That’s the first step. Then they get on board. So we have different services Amazon advertising, we have seller operation. We have brand management. Amazon advertising. We are in charge of just managing advertising For the seller operation. It’s like the brands come to us. They don’t need brand management, but they need, let’s say, they want to change their brand name or there is some issue with any product. They come to us, they open a ticket and our team follows up and solves that issue. With brand management. Now we manage everything, the listing, all of the operation.  

Mansour: 

But apart from that, we also do creatives right, we do creative for our clients and we have a good team for that. So, yes, we do that for them. But if they do Amazon advertising for us, for them, it’s not like, okay, we are not looking at your SEO, we are not checking your images. Our managers actually are good in recommending. Okay, your title is missing these keywords. You’ve got to add this to be able to rank better. To do this, your images are doing this. You don’t have brand history. You could add virtual bundle here, or there are so many things that they give recommendations and sometimes brands do that. Sometimes they don’t do that and if they want our help, yes, we have our creative team, SEO team that could implement them.  

Kevin King: 

What do you see? What’s a common theme that you see with a lot of people that they’re doing wrong when it comes to PPC, when you’re doing these audits? Because I could come to you and have you do an audit and get all your advice and just go implement it myself without hiring you. Because if you’re going to tell me, oh, you need to change your picture to this or you’re missing this keyword, I was like, oh, thank you so much for that free advice, but what are you seeing common when you’re doing these audits? What are some big mistakes that, just over and over and over, these sellers are making? 

Mansour: 

We talked about the complexity of Amazon advertising, but then we want to have a good Amazon PPC. Actually I would say it’s 80-20% rule. That that 20% that brings the 80% of the results is the foundation and the basics. What are those foundations and basics? One is that have a good campaign structure. What do we mean by good campaign structure? In one campaign, try to have one ad group and try to have one listing. I’m not talking about variations. You could have the same variation under the same ad group, but have one campaign, one ad group, one listing. And the reason behind this is that in the ad group level we don’t have any control over the budget. So you can’t. If you have three ad groups, one is performing good, you can move the budget. One is because of budget control. The second also is that Amazon gives some credit in terms of what performance of campaign is. So anyway, it’s a structure one. The second is very simple the naming. Make sure the naming is good, so you know what’s the purpose of the campaign.  

Mansour: 

Third I would say is that we see they are neglecting negation, like it is very simple. There are different. I’m not a big fan of negating related keywords. I’m more of a fan for optimization until you get to a good performance. But sometimes there are keywords that when you go to the search term, like there are tens, not hundreds, depends on the account, but there are many of these search terms that are not related but they are not being negated. So that’s another big mistake we see more and more. The other thing is that optimization, optimization, in reality bid optimization. It’s not difficult, it is. For me it’s very straightforward, very easy. But when you go to account, sometimes especially if you see this in big accounts or I don’t know how they are managing it then you sort by the ACOS. You see 200% ACOS for a talent you haven’t spent. Honestly, what one happened that? I was just blown away. There was this term over 30 day spent 10,000 given with one click with one order. 10,000 with one order. I’m like is anyone managing this account? What the hell is going on? And the issue was that their spend is very high. I feel like it was 300, 400, I don’t know, but the number was very substantial. I’m like this is the worst I have seen. No one is looking at this at all, so there’s an issue there. Yeah, I would say campaign structure, bid optimization, negation and the name. These are pretty much these four or five are. If you do this, you are good. You could grow the account.  

Kevin King: 

Can you talk about what your philosophy is on how TACOS should change over time, from launch? Maybe TACOS is higher to stability, TACOS is lower and there’s not one. Or maybe you believe there is, but I don’t believe there’s one perfect number for TACOS. People are always like what should my TACOS be? There’s a lot of dependencies on that, but can you talk about how to manage that from maybe launch, where it’s higher, to getting it stable over time?  

Mansour: 

So the way I think about the launch is there are three phases, of course, the launch phase. For me, the launch phase usually is a month and a half if you do everything correct, if you plan everything, if you have enough budget and know your goal. Because many times happens that I see brands or sellers they launch a product. They don’t have anything in mind. They’re like, okay, we’re going to launch this product. I’m like, okay, so what’s your goal for the first month? Because that you got to say I want to sell 1000 units in a month or I want to sell 3000. You have to have a number for us to be able to reverse engineer and say, okay, this is the budget we have to start at the beginning. First week, second week so in terms of TACOS for the initial launch, I don’t think there is any TACOS. The only thing I would look at is the conversion rate. You could start with 300 TACOS. You could start with 70% TACOS, depending on how competitive that market is. Right. If you’re launching in a supplement category, your cost per click could start with $8. And let’s say, your product is 25 bucks, 10% conversion rate. I’m getting to the fact that initially, since the cost per click is high, your TACOS could be drastically high, maybe $200, $300.  

Mansour: 

So for the initial launch I’m not looking at TACOS. What I’m looking is to the conversion rate because it’s going to help you rank organically for the keyword. So you have to be very aware of what keywords you are going to rank for. You don’t want to go after everything because, yeah, my approach is that go after every related search term if you have unlimited budget, because you could push them for rank. If you don’t, which most brands? They don’t unlimited budget. You have X amount of budget. You’ve got to plan and say, okay, that dog vitamin, for instance, has thousands of sales per day. I’m not going to generate that to improve my organic ranking. Why I go down the funnel for the medium search volume, long search volume keywords? That with PPC at the beginning we are just generating PPC. Let’s say we are not bringing any external traffic. With PPC, we are just generating sales and we are able to rank our product. So that keyword selection is very important.  

Mansour: 

Initially I would say there is no TACOS for me. I don’t even look at tacos, just making sure our conversion rate is high, above the average conversion rate. From there it starts Like. My goal would be that let’s say you start with 100%. Up to end of the month, when you’re ranking, 100% starts going down and the reason is that initially it’s 100% or more because all of your sales coming from advertising, when you start ranking the TACOS goes down because now you are getting a balance of organic and advertising. So for the second, from second months to third, fourth, yeah, from second month up to two, three months, I will try to be stable around 30%, which, to your point, depends totally to the brand, to the product and what that initial results are. The number is going to be difficult but I would say usually around 30%. I have seen in average not for all of them and after two months from that, meaning from zero, after three months. Now, if everything is stable, I’m like okay, let’s get down to. It could be anywhere from 10 to 20%, based on where you are again.  

Mansour: 

Like for a supplement, usually they aim for 20%. There are still categories that I see 10%. Then their central I see all of them is the lowest TACOS, which is like four or 5%. So depending on your category and also what you are comfortable with. Let’s say, category is everyone is aiming for 20% tacos, but your profit margin is 15%. You don’t want to lose money. So you would say, okay guys, I want 10% TACOS. Everything becomes subjective to what your goal is and also what their category is.  

Kevin King: 

What about the number of keywords? I see people stuffing keywords into their campaigns. You can go up to 1,000. What’s your philosophy on how that should be broken out? You said earlier campaign structure is a common thing. That’s all messed up when you’re doing audits of accounts. What’s the ideal structure and how many keywords in each one?  

Mansour: 

We see both sides of this that we don’t agree with. One side is going single keyword campaign for all the keywords. The other side is just stuffing the keywords in one campaign. So what we are doing is that for very important keywords, high search volume keywords we do single keyword campaigns and as it goes to medium and long tail keywords, it could have four or five, but we never have more than 15 keywords in a campaign. Because more than 15 keywords? And the reason for me is that Amazon is not gonna give you impression for all of them. From experience I have learned that Amazon is rotating, which wants to get impression each day. If you look long term because people, if you, some people say, look, I’m looking at one year, all of them getting impression what do you say? Like no, it’s not true that Amazon is not going to get impression. I’m saying yes, long run, all of them get impression clicks. Then you look at short-term, short-term you see from that, hundred, twenty of them get impression clicks. Then you look at short term short term you see from that, 100, 20 of them just got clicks or impressions. So that is why Amazon also rotating. Plus, if there’s a keyword with high search volume, it’s going to take the whole budget right. You are not going to get benefits of showing up for those long tail keywords that you might be generating. So 15 is the highest that I would go with.  

Kevin King: 

So, with these 15, how are those grouped? Are they grouped by root? Are they grouped by intent? Are they grouped by search volume? Are they grouped by how important they are to you as a seller? What’s the criteria of how you group them?  

Mansour: 

So there are different layers. For me, search volume is on the top and the intent right, higher relative. I don’t want to mix the high relative keywords, the low, intent, low related keywords for a product. So always, and especially in the launch, in the launch, usually because of the budget, again, for me prioritization is highly related keywords, that they cover all the root keywords. In terms of. So for me, search volume and intent is very important, these two. For the root, I see people talk about it but I haven’t seen any results. For I haven’t seen any proof that grouping with root helps. Because I have done many launch for my own product. I don’t do with root keywords. I have started re-ranking campaigns without having any root keywords and it works. So no, I don’t believe that doing that root grouping is doing any benefit from my experience. 

Kevin King: 

Awesome. Well, Mansour, we could keep geeking out here on a bunch of stuff for a while, but we’re already at an hour, so I’m looking forward to, uh, to seeing you in Iceland at BDSS, uh in April. That’s going to be awesome stuff. Can’t wait to. I know you got something juicy to share. That’s going to be next level, um, but that’s that’s going to be awesome. But if, in the meantime, if people want to like come and get an audit or reach out to you or maybe follow you, how do they follow you on LinkedIn and how do they reach out to Incrementum? What’s the the best way to get in touch?  

Mansour: 

So you could. I’m active always on LinkedIn so you can connect with me on LinkedIn and even on my page on LinkedIn. If you go there, there’s a link to do an audit. Follow Incrementum digital Leron on LinkedIn and also you could go directly to increment on digital.com. We have blog posters– 

Kevin King: 

Please spell that for people that are maybe not quite understanding the pronunciation. 

Mansour: 

Increment and digital yeah, is it spelled a little different?  

Mansour: 

Yes, I-C-R. It’s gonna be difficult for me it’s very long. 

Kevin King: 

Watching on the YouTube. It’s on it’s right over his left shoulder, so you can actually see it right over the back of his left shoulder on YouTube. But those of you listening online, it’s Incrementum, incrementum, so awesome. Incrementum Digital. And sign up for their newsletter too. Every I think it’s Thursday night or Friday, it’s one towards the end of the week. I always get that you and Leron and Katie and somebody else standing there like against the wall and then you have all the latest the weekly.  

Mansour: 

That’s Kate’s idea, for sure.  

Kevin King: 

And then you have, you know, the weekly takes from each of you and the latest stuff. So that’s worth getting too. But yeah, I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing that.  

Mansour: 

I appreciate it and can’t wait to see you in Iceland and thank you for having me.  

Kevin King: 

From time to time I also feature some of Mansourr’s content in the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter, so if you’re not a subscriber, make sure you subscribe billiondollarsellerscom. He says it’s one of the only newsletters out there that he constantly reads. Even if he gets busy, he keeps them to the side, he keeps them with that little dot unread, so that he can make sure he doesn’t forget to get to them and BillionDollarSellerscom, every Monday and Thursday, a brand new edition. Speaking of brand new editions, we’ll be back next week with another brand new AM/PM podcast with the amazing and lovely Shivali Patel from Helium 10.  

Kevin King: 

We’re going to talk about her journey and what she’s up to these days and how she’s crushing it with some of her brands, and what’s up on the Helium 10 side of things, too, is going to be really, really good. And before we go, I’ve got some words of wisdom for you. You’re only behind if you look back a year and you’re still the same person. You’re only behind if you look back a year and you’re still the same person. Take care and see you next week.  

Enjoy this episode? Want to be able to ask questions to Kevin King live in a small group with other 7 and 8-figure Amazon sellers? Join the Helium 10 Elite Mastermind and get monthly workshops, training, and networking calls with Kevin at h10.me/elite