How to Profitably Navigate the Jungle of Amazon ads

Jeffro (00:01.08)

Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, we are exploring the complex world of Amazon advertising with Elizabeth Green, the founder of Jungler. Elizabeth has made it her mission to help Amazon sellers break through the noise and achieve their revenue goals, all while balancing growth and profitability. So today we’re going to dive into Amazon ad strategies, balancing ad spend with growth, and why fully automated solutions aren’t necessarily the answer for everyone. So welcome to the show, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (00:27.748)

Hey, thanks so much for having me. So glad to be here.

Jeffro (00:31.18)

Yeah, absolutely. Now I’m excited to talk about Amazon ads because we haven’t covered that on the show before. We’ve talked about Google ads and Facebook ads, but Amazon ads are a very specific beast off to the side over here. Now a lot of our listeners own service businesses, so they may not be selling products on Amazon. Some of them might, but do you think there’ll be something they can take away from our conversation today?

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (00:53.912)

Yeah, definitely. I mean, like as a service provider myself, like there’s definitely a lens in which I would maybe view advertising that’s going to have some crossover. think in some ways a lot of advertising is very universal. Yeah, it is a very interesting world of Amazon advertising. The type of advertising we typically run is a prerequisite is you need to be selling on the platform.

Jeffro (01:03.598)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (01:16.314)

That being said, Amazon is looking to become a dominant player in the online marketing space. And so expect interesting things from them in the future when it comes to being able to leverage Amazon specific audiences and all of that, like shopper knowledge that they have to like the broader digital world. So I’m really excited, excited to see how they expand. Although again, for context, my area of expertise, or at least what I have most experience in as a, practitioner, tends to me like that more niche subject of advertising, Amazon specific products.

Jeffro (01:55.297)

Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely some business models where it makes sense to have your service and sell products. For example, know, carpet cleaning service might sell their own cleaning products. So I can see how that would be relevant for them. But it’s interesting that you say they might be expanding that platform because I could definitely see how they they’ve got so much data on these buyers and their buying habits and everything. So they could definitely open an additional platform where a service business could get in front of those people, even if it’s not on the Amazon platform directly. So that will be interesting to see.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (02:00.549)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (02:24.57)

Yeah, they’re definitely open and they’re calling them non endemic ads and there is some access to them already for some of the bigger players. I don’t know if you’ve been shopping on Amazon at all. And you’ve seen like an interesting ad for maybe Geico or another like broader service like that. So there are those ads that are running. But again, the way these things typically roll out is it’s

Like it’s really for the big players and the big budgets. But the thing that they’ve done really, really well that I’m interested to see if they do carry that over into the non endemic space, I don’t know. But with again, more product focus, again, prerequisites, you have to be selling some sort of physical product on the Amazon platform itself to even get access to these types of ads. But the entry point as far as budgets is very, very low.

which essentially has like democratized access to things even they’ve since rolled out streaming TV ads, which again, if you were a big player, you had access that in the know you could get access to streaming TV ads. They’re available like inside ad console for like your regular everyday seller for you know, maybe 25 to $50 a day budget be able to run those like on streaming TV. It’s crazy. again,

huge democrat, only access to all of this really good shopper intent data, but then also they’re sort of like democratizing the entry point, which is, I think, really, really interesting. And if they decide to really roll this out to a broader market, we’ll put them ahead.

Jeffro (03:53.665)

Yeah, no, that’s very interesting and that’ll be fun to watch. And I was thinking, know, in order the prerequisite to be a seller, obviously you could sell products, but you also sell swag that’s related to your brand. And even if you’re an author, you know, if you write a book about the thing that you have your service business for, does that count? Because now you’re selling a book on the platform. So.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (04:04.87)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (04:12.58)

Yep. Yep. So long as you’re selling through the platform. Again, like there there’s a whole like it needs to be eligible for selling which is like very typical of most advertising platforms, you know, like it can’t be adult content, obviously, and it can’t have any religious connotations, you know, there’s just like typical things weapons, they probably don’t want you like advertising those things. But again, your everyday service provider is probably not trying to associate themselves with those types of products anyways.

Jeffro (04:37.665)

Yeah. Okay. Well, very cool. How about let’s jump into some of the Amazon specific ad stuff. So let’s start with ad spend control. Can you talk about, you know, why having tight control over ad spend is important and how do you actually do that?

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (04:53.24)

Hmm. Yeah, so that’s a that’s a great question. Aspyn control is really everything. For context, we tend to work with a lot of founder led brands, which are not like the types of brands really like, hey, throw 15 and 20 grand ad budget at it. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see what comes back in terms of realize, and we’ll just like figure it out from there. Right? If you’re dealing with founder led brands, like they’re growing off of their own bottom line, you get to you spend too much ad dollars, all of sudden, the brand is going to be out of business or the

Business is going to go out. That’s not sustainable. And so you need to make sure that you find a way to make sure that ads are serving the greater interest. So you definitely want to have a long-term growth in play. I think if you’re thinking long-term, obviously not every single penny is going to come back to you today. But you do want to make sure that there’s some plan for it to come back to you tomorrow. And what we found is that over six or seven years of running ads is good ad management is really about good ad spend control.

It’s making sure that you’re factoring budgets again to the bottom line and just those growth goals. And so really, there’s multiple ways to adjust budgets. The two that are really available to Amazon advertising and to the two levers that we pull most frequently, there is a way to set like an overall account cap. So you can just have a ton of campaigns underneath that and say like, Hey,

You know Amazon, know I’m telling you that I have all of these campaigns with all of these budgets But in reality, I don’t want you ever spend over like $2,000 today. Please keep it underneath that That’s Sometimes works, but it doesn’t always work exactly the way that You would want that to so for example There’s only one ad type that technically falls into that budget that will be like considered for that cap, which is

Jeffro (06:40.439)

Hm. It’s odd.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (06:40.88)

to be honest, as an admin is you’re slightly annoying. And then the other thing is, is that budget is actually spread across the entire month. So what they do is they take that budget, they like multiply that by how many days are in the month. And then you know, they say like on average, you know, so on average, your budget is going to end up with that at the end of the month. But the problem is, I love I hate to be the one who bites the hand that feeds me because like literally,

This is the platform I built my business off of. But the one thing that I have noticed recently is that they will have these like, I don’t want to say sneaky updates, but like there’s updates, and then they’ll tell you like two months later, or sometimes not even at all. Like, hey, by the way, we made this change. And so unless you’re in ad console, and you’re like, know what things are there and be like, that’s different. Like, and then I know how the system works. So I understand how these new rules apply.

Jeffro (07:34.573)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (07:37.318)

So one of them was actually an update to the budget. So historically, the way that they’ve done it is that they elect to allow themselves to increase your daily budget up to 25 % providing that there’s additional budget from prior days. So like say you underspent one day, technically by the averages, is it like, well, we have these additional like $50 and we can apply this.

Jeffro (07:56.608)

Okay.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (08:01.38)

which will make budget fluctuations, which is confusing to some people because they’re like, wait, I set a $2,000 a day budget and like I’m spending two hundred and four like two thousand four hundred dollars like what’s going on? Well, one of their like more sneaky updates was they they added a additional setting and then elected to like automatically apply that setting to everybody’s accounts where they said, hey, we can elect to spend up to 100 percent increase.

Again, it’s providing that the budget has not been spent. So it’s not like they’re going to overspend if you average out the month, but like that could cause a really large budget fluctuations for the day. So there’s that like, it’s kind of annoying to like micromanage those specific budgets. So that’s something to be aware of. So then the other really great control is over campaigns and campaign budget. So what we do is we make sure that there’s a balance of both.

Jeffro (08:31.305)

Dang.

Jeffro (08:43.091)

Yeah.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (09:00.767)

account level caps, there’s some people will say like, hey, is you can elect to like remove the account level cap and say, hey, just use whatever campaign budgets I have. And then those daily budgets are going to be what’s applied, you know, the average for my entire account. Or you can set the account level cap. So I just kind of explained why the account level caps aren’t like, absolutely set in stone.

Jeffro (09:25.32)

Yeah.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (09:25.414)

But what we found is that even if you would prefer to use the campaign level budgets and just kind of leave everything to go, you know, as it would, I still controlling it, obviously, like you don’t want to just uncap everything.

we have actually found it very useful to like still set an account level cap, even if you say like, hey, I’m gonna set it like, even like $500 above where I would typically, you know, where my natural spend is trending. Anyways, we sort of use these still as like failsafe options, just in case like a campaign pops off, which it doesn’t always and that’s very few and far between. But when it does happen, it is very helpful to have those like settings in place to capture it.

Jeffro (09:55.795)

Right.

Jeffro (10:05.48)

Yes.

Jeffro (10:08.817)

Right, the worst thing that can happen to a seller is have all this demand and you run out of inventory. Plus, now you don’t have the cash because you overspent on your ads to get more in. And yeah, that’s not a good place to be.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (10:22.63)

for sure.

Jeffro (10:24.307)

So for those sellers that are starting out, obviously their budget’s going to be smaller. This is going to be a more important thing to focus on. How do you figure out what those budgets should be? Because obviously you don’t want to cut into profitability too much, but you want to keep the brand going. And how do you find the right balance there?

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (10:41.584)

That is a fantastic question. And one that we’ve currently been, I say currently been working through, but I think it’s been a couple of years now. Because this question is really coming up a lot in the ad community, especially now that, I’ll be honest, current economic climate and then just the migration of the platform.

any advertising platform you get into, you get in like the ground floor, you have like cent pennies on the dollar in terms of cost per clicks. And then over time, things increase to the point where the OG advertisers are like, who is paying these costs? Like this is insane, right? That’s kind of where we’re trending. And so that plus, you know, additional storage fees and everything, it’s becoming like more and more important to like really factor it like.

It was always important to factor in the bottom line, but when costs just aren’t that high, people get loosey goosey with their P &Ls these days. You can’t afford to do that because that’s going to put you out of business. And so what we find is it’s really having a frank conversation with the brand out. A lot of times it’s like your ad budget doesn’t always isn’t always necessarily right or wrong. It’s what’s going to work best for the business. Obviously that has to have some sort of, you know, marrying of

what is possible given the market because it’s still an ad auction, you still have the market trends. But so what we found is like having a frank discussion with the brand saying, Hey, what can you guys afford? Right? Like, are you? Do you have like a funding round where you’re like, Hey, once this money’s gone, if we’re not profitable, or at least bringing in something by the end of this, like we’re out of luck, or do you say, Hey, I’ve got like 50 other products that are super profitable, those get pretty much fun, my new venture, like, you know, don’t be unreasonable, but I have runway.

So it’s just getting a really thorough understanding of how that’s going. And then looking at the market, so doing a really good market evaluation. What is the cost in these markets more specifically? Because Amazon is really primarily a pay-per-click platform. They’ve done pay-per-impression. There’s a little bit of that, but it’s mostly pay-per-click. And then just saying, so what are the costs involved in this? And then the one thing that I find…

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (12:56.944)

I think there’s a lot of good advertisers doing this, but I don’t think it’s talked about very much, at least not in my industry, is making sure that you’re evaluating that sort of market analysis and sort of the what’s possible analysis through the lens of what the business can afford. Where I find most businesses go off the rails is they had some…

video they watched on YouTube that someone was like, all right, you need these 100 keywords, and you need these five types of campaigns. And like, this is exactly how you set it up. And there’s no like, curation based on what the brand needs and what the brand can afford and what their goals are. So really, we try and add in that curation piece to say, okay, maybe this is a keyword or this is a search page that you absolutely long term would love to dominate that. That’s going to cost you $500 a day bare minimum.

Jeffro (13:30.867)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (13:48.422)

test, like maybe that’s not best if our budget for this product is $200 today. Let’s see where else we can spend the budget around. So it’s really like doing that evaluation and then that really will help shape the best starting budget. And then again, everything is in the beginning, you’re flying blind, you have no data, you’re making the best decision possible. Then you get the data and then you can iterate based on that.

Jeffro (14:12.307)

So here’s a question then. What about if you don’t even have a budget yet for ads? There’s Amazon SEO, right? If you want to make sure your listing comes up when someone’s typing and searching for a particular product. So when should the seller start running ads versus simply doing that SEO?

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (14:20.538)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (14:29.67)

SEO definitely comes first. Like the listing needs to be in place. Those are really free traffic. And then you need to make sure the listing is in a place where it can convert. Like what’s the point in paying for traffic if you’re just going to be spinning your wheels? But I would say that, unfortunately, Amazon has very much become like a pay to play platform in a lot of ways, where it is notoriously hard to get visibility.

on new products if you don’t have a traffic source from somewhere. Now if you have like say a newsletter list you’ve built up or you know you have a YouTube channel and like you said like maybe they have some sort of merchandise or t shirts or you know it’s somewhere else that they can sort of use that traffic source and direct it to Amazon and like use Amazon is sort of like you know just like the conversion rate or like the purchasing portal. That’s absolutely doable.

100 % you could do that and would you need ads for that? No, but like you have that traffic source, right? If you don’t have that built-in traffic source and you haven’t really like solved that part of the equation, Amazon advertising is going to give you really the best conversion focused traffic that I think you’re going to be able to get. Off-platform ads, do they help? Absolutely.

but they aren’t as typically as conversion rate focused and they’re notoriously a little bit hit or miss and difficult. It’s really dependent on the product.

Jeffro (16:06.448)

So do you work mostly with branded products as opposed to the generic commoditized things? Because obviously you run into specific issues on the Amazon platform with, you know, like getting the buy box stolen or things like that. So what do you see in your experience there?

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (16:20.326)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (16:26.626)

Yeah, that’s definitely an issue. Also, there’s some really interesting dynamics if you are advertising for someone who’s selling licensed products, meaning, you know, they’ve licensed someone else’s brand to create like a product underneath that brand, which is great for the brand recognition. There’s really great again, built in traffic for those search traffic for those types of products.

However, some of the ads and the interactions between like how Amazon views branded traffic and branded conversions specifically in sponsored brand ads could actually lead you to be like paying to make sales for another seller who is selling under the brand. So that’s just something to keep in mind. Sponsored product ads don’t have that issue though. So you’ll be perfectly fine. And those primarily are where most of the budget goes for any brand, or small.

Jeffro (17:02.694)

Ha

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (17:16.11)

And then so I would say like, we really span the gamut in terms of the types of products we work with. I mean, I just told you about like, hey, there’s this issue with licensed products and we’ll go all the way over to like private label products or you know, there might be somebody who’s doing more wholesale. Wholesale is traditionally difficult because the margins are a little bit slim. You definitely wanna make sure that you primarily have the buy box. There are some brands that we’re advertising for that…

for whatever reason, they’ve just decided that resellers are a big piece of their, their strategy in terms of generating sales. The issues there is that there are certain ads that will not run if you don’t have the buy box, which I mean, honestly, it’s great if you have resellers, you don’t want to be like paying to send them traffic. Right, but then that like, continuation of the ads and making sure the ads are continually running, there’s actually benefits that in terms of

Jeffro (18:00.058)

Right, so you’re not paying for someone else to get the sale, right?

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (18:11.602)

how the campaigns actually perform. Like on and off is not the greatest. And also if you do like for this particular brand, if resellers are a part of your strategy, they would actually prefer to be able to run ads to even get those sales. And that’s not really possible. There is one ad type we can use to do that, but it traditionally hasn’t been, it’s more of like a brand awareness play and it’s less, it’s less straight forward in terms of the conversion.

And so that does make it notoriously difficult. And so for those reasons, we find that we work really well, typically with like private label sellers who like the differentiation between like private label and white label. I’ll be honest, it’s kind of a slim one, but it’s really like with white label products. The idea is that like it’s anyone can go and get it and purchase and get the same product. I’ll be honest, there’s some people who call themselves private label sellers. Then when you look at the product, you’re like, that’s a white label and you slap the brand.

Private label sellers would be more like, hey, I know that there’s one that’s one type of product. So I have a market that I’m getting into. It might be like other products in the market, but I’m definitely doing the work to like build a legit brand under it. I’ve done some differentiation of the product. It’s not like someone can go on, you know, like Alibaba today and immediately get my exact same product with all the features.

Jeffro (19:33.456)

Very interesting. And one other question I was thinking of, Amazon ads are less dependent on like a creative, right? On other platforms, you’ve got to come up with a cool imagery or text or even a video to try and convince someone to click on the ad. But on Amazon, it’s more of just like placement, know, preferred placement of your product in the search results. So you almost have fewer options there. So you just kind of are turning it on and off. Is that accurate?

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (19:41.208)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (19:50.917)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (20:00.866)

Yeah, I would say yes. So sponsored product ads are and I had mentioned those as the ones that you know, most ad budget is spent towards there’s the most ad inventory for these, these placements. So I think that has a lot to factor in as well. So these are the ads that honestly, if you aren’t aware of them, they look very native to the platform. And also, you know, you see those carousels sometimes where it’s like four stars and above and it’s like a lot of those are sponsored placements by the

So they look like very native, like very like, natural, where like if you ever gone to Amazon, you might see like a video or like there’s a headline, it’s much more apparent that it’s like an advertising placement. Those ones there is creative involved. Obviously with the video, there’s a lot of creative involved. The headline ads, you can now add like lifestyle images or is very small.

like short headline copy, you can add to those ones as well, which does, you know, have some impact lifestyle images more than the others. But you’re right with the sponsor product ads, the one benefit is because they look so native. And the benefit of Amazon advertising, specifically if you’re selling on the platform is that it is a very conversion rate focused platform. So for example, if I mine,

you know, if even scrolling on tik tok, or I’m scrolling on Facebook or Instagram, like I’m not like looking to like, I want to find this thing and buy it, right? I’m like, I’m wanting to be entertained. And then if I get a disruption by an ad that you know, piques my interest enough, right time, right place, then I’ll probably go through and click and ideally, you know, I would be purchasing. Well, with Amazon, if someone goes to search something on Amazon, like the

probably in the mood to buy like maybe they’re trying to get a lay of the land and see what’s happening. But for the most part, like if I’m going to Amazon, if I’m typing in something very specific, I want to purchase that product. And so the beauty of like sponsored product as you get you can push yourself up and search looks super native. So it looks like it’s supposed to be there. There are some fail safes. So like you will pretty much never be able to like

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (22:06.278)

If you wanted to show up with your running socks product on like running shoes, they do have fail safes in the algorithms. You can’t just like shortcut everything no matter how high of a bid you put in. So you’d still have to be relevant for the search, but it does really allow for you to like, again, capture that inherent shopper traffic in the platform.

Jeffro (22:29.536)

I mean, this is all very interesting. I’m sure if people are listening and they’ve never sold on Amazon before, some of this might sound crazy, like the fact that you could pay and someone else gets a sale just because of the way their platform works. But it’s great to know that you do have the levers you can turn and you do have at least some options and ways to make sure you’re not overspending, even though you got to pay attention to those sneaky updates to make sure that that’s factored into your equations.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (22:40.89)

Yeah.

Jeffro (22:59.328)

This was really helpful. So thank you for being here today, Elizabeth. Amazon ads serve a very specific purpose. So this is a really cool glimpse into that world. For those of you listening, go connect with Elizabeth if you want to help with Amazon ads. And her links will be in the show notes. And last question for you, Elizabeth. Is there any common misconception about Amazon advertising that you want to clear up for new sellers?

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (23:09.839)

No, I appreciate it.

Elizabeth Greene – Junglr.com (23:24.783)

That is a great question. I will say for a new seller, like if you’re just getting into it, you probably heard everything I say about like budgets and you know, like making sales for your competitors and like all this craziness and my gosh, like what do even focus on and you’re gonna get in and there’s gonna be like four different ad types you can choose from you’re not gonna know like, so I’ll just give you a tip in terms of like starting and narrow focus. I would say

you can absolutely focus on just sponsored product dots by the way, those will not make sales for your competitors. So you’ll be totally fine. Again, providing you own your brands, there’s no selling underneath that brand, like you’ll be fine there. And then I would just say the biggest focus I could give you in terms of you know, just making sure those ads perform. We found focusing in on relevancy of what you’re targeting is huge. That helps with conversions. The algorithm likes it as well.

And so if you focus in on where does my product fit into the market and you love your sponsor product ads to show in front of that. And then if I had to give you a third one, I would say if you focus in on bid management, adjustment of bids, that will get you very, very far. That’ll get you at least 60 % of the way, maybe even 75. And then from there, you can figure out the rest.

Jeffro (24:43.17)

Well, thanks again for being here, Elizabeth, and thanks to all you guys for listening. If this episode was helpful for you, please leave a review for the show on iTunes or Spotify or whatever app you use to listen. Take care, and I’ll see you in the next episode.