My Amazon Guy, Steven Pope. Amazon's strategies on Branding, Image Optimization, and PPC

Steven Pope is a visionary entrepreneur and the driving force behind My Amazon Guy , an Amazon agency renowned for its ability to get products seen and sold . They have a proven track record , and My Amazon Guy helps brands unlock their full sales potential by optimizing listings , managing PPC and SEO and their catalogs .

Steven is also the host of a very popular podcast that I listen to and a YouTube channel called My Amazon Guy , where he shares his wealth of knowledge and insights with a wide audience . Please join me in welcoming Steven Pope to Planet Amazon . Welcome , Steven , hello . Thanks for having me . So how are you today ? And thanks for joining . What is up ?

I listened to your show when I was getting into the biz and you know you taught me a lot and you know you bring it on with attitude . So I really do enjoy listening to you . So you have a great personality . You'll talk yeah , yeah , for sure , listening to you . So you have a great personality . Yeah , yeah , for sure .

And so you know why don't we start with just telling us a little bit more about your background , because you've been doing this for a while and how you got this my Amazon Guy thing going Well .

I learned how to start a sales outbound process for the first time a couple of years ago , and so today we gross more than $20 million as an agency .

We help manage over $800 million on the Amazon platform , and what really gets me up every single day is that I just love leveling up life and I play video games and just like life , life is a video game and if you don't go to that next level , it just it doesn't feel right , right , Like you gotta .

Every single day , it's gotta be something smaller , bigger , better , even if it's an incremental game , and and my whole goal is to accelerate prosperity to everything around me .

And the point is that to have a strong brand on Amazon doesn't necessarily mean people remember your brand .

They might remember the experience , but they don't remember your brand , and so , because of that , a lot of the things that you might have read in a business book over time or heard from somebody on stage talking about how important branding is , it's a totally different thing today . So I launched a soap brand on Amazon called Age of Sage .

Now this is after one of my kids . This is my daughter . She's five . You can see the avatar is basically just like her . It's made after her , and so I was trying to figure out how to manufacture stuff in the States , because I hated working in China . I visited China . I went to the Canton Fair . It was a miserable experience .

The Chinese people are miserable over there . When I visited them , they made me feel miserable while I was there . I was like , why am I doing this to myself ?

So I was really trying to figure out how can I manufacture stuff in the States , and I'd already tried to launch a hot sauce and that was a failure , because when I shipped it into Amazon , I paid Amazon to do the prep work . And this was before I was big and well-known .

This was seven years , eight years ago , and I was doing this out of my garage and I shipped in a thousand of these and I paid Amazon to do the prep work .

So they put the bubble wrap around it , they slap on the F and skew and then they shipped it out in padded envelopes and I started getting my brother and my family and everybody that was buying it on launch day , and there was hot sauce shards everywhere .

This is a five pound glass bottle , and so I've experienced a lot of you know problems selling on Amazon , and I've asked myself the question like is Amazon dumb Right ? Does Jeff Bezos not know how to set up a system ? And clearly he does , because he wouldn't be the billionaire he wasn't today If that wasn't the case .

Amazon Prime and logistics and all the FBA facilities they speak for themselves , but when it comes to the selling experience as an Amazon seller , they don't give a shit about us . They don't care at all . They haven't done anything to help sellers .

And so while I discovered this , before I even started my agency , I started to have panic attacks about what was going to happen next . Is Amazon going to suspend my account ? Am I going to have my listing yanked and on Black Friday , know my ? On Black Friday last year , amazon took down all of my tumblers all of them .

They delisted you Delisted the entire subcategory , right . So parody tumblers does not exist on Amazon anymore . I wasn't the only one affected . I just happened to be the industry leader , so obviously it was like a giant middle finger to me .

But I lost a quarter million dollars on that problem , right , and I want to be very clear I think Amazon is worth doing , but the reason why I talk about these challenges is because it's not passive income and I have found that when I start talking about these challenges , other people have also experienced them and you know we need a little bit of business

therapy to go around to deal with all this . And you know we need a little bit of business therapy to go around to deal with all this .

So I know that was a long answer to your branding question , but bottom line is , yes , I have a brand , I have Age of Sage , and I put it on the logo and it looks cool , but nobody goes on Amazon and says I want to buy Age of Sage . Now , a thousand people a month do to be clear . But that's not generating most of my income , right .

Most of my income is being generated off of non-brand keywords like artisan soap or soap for men , and those are the keywords that drive the business , and so , because of that , when somebody is trying to debate whether I'm going to buy an Age of Sage product or Dr Squatch or the 20 other lookalikes , they're making the decision based off , not the brand , typically

.

So , instead of trying to hyper focus on brand and all that , instead you need to focus on optimization and how your main image looks Right . So I'm very outspoken about how you need to put as much stuff as you can in the main image as possible . Some people start throwing yellow flags immediately when I bring this up . They're like terms of service .

Your listing is going to get suspended . I've never had a listing suspended for a main image . I've had an image suppression which you can clear in about five to 10 minutes .

But the things that I advocate for which will increase your CTR and if you want to know my , my number one hack , the number one way to grow sales fastest on Amazon with the least amount of effort , without a question , it's the main image right .

If you , if you add a keyword to the main image , you are going to increase your CTR , your click-through rate , if you include , if you increase your click-through rate , you're going to increase your traffic . You increase your trafficking and increase your sales . And , by the way , ctr is also directly correlated to conversion rates , which throws people off usually .

But if people are more likely to click on your product , they're more likely to buy it too .

So , adding a keyword to the main image , making sure that you showcase all of the ingredients If you sell a supplement , show me the pills . If you have packaging or really nice packaged goods , make sure you show the package next to the item and the item itself . You don't want to just show one or the other . You got to show both .

If you got an accessory , you got like a plug . If you're selling electronic , show the accessory . If you have eight different color variations , you might want to put that in the side or the bottom of your image , like Zulay Kitchen does , to showcase all of that as well . So there's a lot of things that I advocate for .

Instead of branding , you need to go focus on metrics , ctr , traffic , conversion . Without a doubt , those are your power . Three metrics .

Uh , all the things that we talked about are present in their main image . It's a very busy main image . So they have milk frother with stam as their keyword . They don't make it as front and center , as large as I typically advocate . This is probably the weakest thing in the main image . But they do everything else very , very well .

So they've got the red bow , which makes it look giftable . That one's a little bit over the top , I'd say . You know , if we're going to talk gray or black or whatever , that's getting closer to the dark gray and then but you can still get away with it and then showing all the variations and the colors showcasing what you can do with it .

So it's a milk frother , it makes this nice little coffee cup and it shows even the spinning action , so what it does to the milk . It has every one of these elements . When somebody looks at this , they know exactly what they're getting . The fact that they have a little starburst here to show that it comes in 80 colors . They do all of that .

So over on my website I've got some good examples .

So when we scroll through here , you see four ads followed by Zulay Kitchen showing up in organic slot number one . Okay , so we see milk splash , we see coffee beans , we see the device in all of these competitor images . But zulay kitchen has organic slots one , three , four , that might even be . There's number two , unless that's like a close .

Look , it's got to be . There's peach tree store literally copied everything . Yeah , right , I mean what a ripoff .

Are you going to click on Zulay Kitchen over here on the left , or are you going to click on ? You're going to click on Zulay Kitchen over here on the left or you're going to click on Bonzen Kitchen on the right ? It's a no-brainer which one you're going to click on . Right . This Zulay Kitchen sells 20,000 of them . Bonzen sells 4,000 .

Right , and the only thing that Bonzen can do to out-compete Zulay Kitchen is win on price . And if you win on price today you're gonna lose on price tomorrow . There's just no question . But just to showcase , like some of the easy keyword additions that you could do .

So I've got some of these examples that my Amazon got a com slash IMG if anybody wants to look at it . But the smudge sticks here . Take a commodity item on the left , now it's branded on the right and we show case the keyword with smudge sticks Cooking , baking sheets . This is my all-time favorite example .

And but , like , when we look at On the left , here we have a cooking baking sheet right , but on the right , here we're now selling grandma's baking and when you see this , you immediately smell chocolate chip cookies from the kitchen that grandma made when you visited right . Which of these two invokes a memory ?

Which of these two invokes your senses , your smell sense that you didn't even think about right , so your eye triggers the nose ? On the left , it's like oh , it's another drawer of junk right . On the right , it's oh my gosh , I wanted some of those cookies and so you can Photoshop on a little sticker here . It looks like it's on the product .

By the way , once you do this and you prove it works on your product , what should you do ? You should go to your manufacturer and add this to the item , but to prove the concepts , Photoshop is sufficient to get you off and running .

And to any of the pedantic followers that are like TUS and the comments and the haters I'm going to get , my answer to you is this If you just do what the customer is looking for , if you help customers , TOS won't matter and people don't get in trouble for this .

Amazon doesn't enforce it and I'll prove it today if you're interested , but let me show one more example , and this is the Happy Me Journal . And so on the left , we have a yellow journal , and if I asked you , Adam , why would you buy this item and you only had the information on the left , You'd be like because it's yellow .

Right Now , the same question on the right , though why would you buy the journal on the right , Adam ?

I did this image for free for him and it tripled his sales in seven days . He didn't even have a plus content up . His secondary images weren't that great . He didn't even have A-plus content up . His secondary images weren't that great . I don't even know how much ads he was spending at the time .

All we did was switch the main image from the left to the right , right here , and it made a 3x sales difference . So when we talk about click-through rates , it converts at major dividends . It pays out really , really big . So this is the future of branding on Amazon and it's about click-through rate control .

Ctr is on every individual keyword and whatever keyword is showing at the top of your SQP , your brand analytics , that is most likely a good candidate to add to the main image product packaging . I'll show one more example . This time we'll go over to the bankrupt aggregator called Thrasio's original success story , and that is the Angry Orange yes , angry Orange .

That product original success story , and that is the angry orange yes , angry orange pet product . And so what we can see here is that they're doing everything we just talked about with the keyword odor eliminator , smack dab on the packaging right here , gigantic . Can you even find the brand name ? You can , but it's difficult , it's .

It's even you know , one , fourth , the-fourth the size , one-third the size , here at the very top there , and you can see Angry Orange when we zoom in .

All Thrasio did when they bought this brand was two things One , they watered down the product to make a higher margin and two , they changed the packaging to make it with a giant keyword , and that 7x the sales in less than a year . So everybody is doing this . Everybody needs to know about how to improve their sales here .

Now , if we type into Google household brand names and we get a list of household brand names , usually when I do this search I get like Clorox or whatever , so I'll do it off memory . But if , but if we type in Colgate , for example , and we scroll down , we'll see a brown box right there , pack of four , right .

By the way , that doesn't come with the brown box that says pack of four on it . When you buy that , it's in a bag , right ? Yeah , another one of my favorite examples is HP printer , right ? So there's another household brand name and theirs is a little bit more egregious .

They don't do it on every single product , but when we get down to it , here we go six months of ink included , and they just put it on the printed page . Right , this doesn't come with a purple piece of paper that says six months of ink included .

They may not be adhering to the best practices we just advocated for , but anybody that's in a big category , you're gonna see the best seller doing these things .

Does it really help or not ?

Now when you optimize the listing , you can get it up to 15% or 20% and that can make a very big difference . Now a listing with one or two images is no way it's going to be an 8% conversion .

It's probably going to be more like 3% or 4% points , unless it's like a big box retail store product that's in every mall and every 13-year-old teenager is buying this lip gloss , for example .

I've seen some really bad beauty product pages in my day , but those are typically driven by omni-channel while somebody's at the store or they're buying it in the store because they can get it off Amazon for 50 cents cheaper or whatever . So I think that the secondary image stack , the A-plus content , the brand story , will pay major dividends .

But if you can't get the main image right , start there first and spend 10 hours on the main image . Spend a couple hours on the secondary images . Maybe you need to get an infographic . Maybe you need to have somebody using your product looking directly at the camera with eye contact , right ?

Maybe there's things that you need to do and all kinds of ways or mechanisms you can improve the image stack , whether it's lifestyle images , infographics , informational text images you comparing against your competitor product why they should buy your product . Maybe you have a high return rate that you see in the customer comments .

You need to sell them into some objections in the secondary image stack . It's a great place to do that .

Here's my framework , and I love to take all of the theory and boil everything down to a simple framework , because then it becomes so easy for you to advocate and teach the people around you and make sure your virtual assistants are following all the things you talk about .

Text is for robots , images is for people and when you understand this , that means you can go run the runway with as much SEO keyword stuffing as you'd like in the text why ? Because that's for robots . But the images you need to be hyper-focused on .

You need to run A B tests , you need to be understanding what the consumer is looking for and you need to have everything built into those images to affect the consumer , to make them want to buy your product . Give them the banana for scale . Give me the emotional connection . If you sell a pet product and don't show me dogs , you're crazy .

Right Like you're just crazy . If you sell a baby product and don't put babies in 80% of your image stack , you're bonkers . Crazy because that is what drives consumers right . If you don't have a customer avatar and nobody knows what you sell or who you are , that's a problem . People need to understand what you do , what you sell and who you are .

Customer avatars , image stacks those are what drive consumers to understand what your product is , what it does and if it's right for them .

If you're not sure who your number one competitor is , put your product in against six of them and just see what consumers say , because it will prompt some interesting thoughts .

And then my second favorite A-B test is to change one element of the main image and make an addition or a subtraction and run an A-B test like that to see kind of a meaningful difference . So that Happy Me journal that I showed you , that won 98 to 2 .

So you have to use an A-B test sometimes to persuade people . Sometimes , even when you give data to somebody , it's still not persuasive , and that is like the epitome of the human mind , like psychology 101 . How do you persuade people ? When I was in college , I was on the college debate circuit . I was on scholarship .

I beat Harvard at a national tournament one time . But I'm here to tell you that . You know , even though I could go AFNEG on any topic you could pick any issue right now on Amazon AFNEG I'll argue the topic . No problem , would love it , would probably win that debate . But I'll tell you one other thing that's way more important . It didn't persuade anybody .

You know , like the people that heard me debate , I didn't persuade a single person . So what's the freaking point of winning the debate , right ? So so I love using data to try and persuade people , but sometimes data is not enough . Sometimes you have to figure out what persuades the individual , and so there's a lot of psychology behind that .

We could tie that into how you persuade somebody to click on your image . You tie that into how to persuade your team to take behavioral action , your team to take behavioral action .

But since I'm now a CEO of over 500 employees , me trying to figure out how to persuade people other than just cracking my whip or throwing money at the problem has been a lifelong mission that I've tried to overcome the last five or six years .

What are your thoughts on this Pretty big topic ?

But I think the sub point of always be advertising is sometimes lost . Always advertise every single product . And some people are choosing not to advertise some products . Maybe they don't advertise every SKU , maybe they don't advertise every color variation or whatever it might be , or maybe they got a weak seller and the ads have a higher rate cost .

But I have found time and time again that if , let's say , I take on a new account and there's a thousand SKUs and today they only advertise 17 of them , the fastest way to grow that account would be to create an auto catch-all PPC campaign , put a 5 cent bid and make a dedicated ad group to every single SKU .

So a thousand SKU , a thousand ad groups , one campaign and I'm here to tell you that that can generate thousands of dollars at ridiculous 20 to one ROAS , sometimes 5% ACoS , just by having a catch-all 5 cent auto bid campaign .

Well , the problem with that is that the auto campaign will often , more often than not , have a lower ACoS than an exact match campaign . So you , by and large , by promoting a good keyword from auto and you negate it off auto and put it in exact , for some reason you are throwing away five , 10 percentage points of ACOS .

And so people still today make that mistake . So I like to use the mantra never negate a good keyword .

So if you want to get really sophisticated , just to go the most advanced strategy , you might have three campaigns with different bidding strategies , or even you can do this at the ad group level too , technically . But let's say , three campaigns , each of them had a different budget and each of them had a different bid .

And maybe you want to have the ability to never turn off ads but you want to have a lower bid after a certain budget threshold , and so that would be a strategic reason why you don't want to have the same keyword in multiple campaigns . So never negate a good keyword but on the other hand , run negations weekly .

I'm still flabbergasted sometimes when I see other PPC campaign structures and they don't add negations to broad match or auto campaigns and I'm like I don't get it . Why are you wasting money ? I firmly believe that you should have one keyword target for every two negations . Now to get to that it sometimes takes like a year to get to that threshold .

So if you're listening to this and you're advertising in a thousand keywords , you only negated 57 . Don't freak out , this is just an opportunity for you . Let's say your ACOS today is 50 percent and you only have 37 negations .

If you add another thousand negations , I bet you your ACOS will get down to 35 percent because you'll negate all the things that don't meet your threshold . Now that might cripple your growth , let's be clear .

But if that was important to you , if margin and getting the ACOS down was important to you , that would be the easiest way to do it other than lowering bids , which could also help . So I believe that auto and broad match campaigns are super underrated .

I personally , on my own accounts , put 80% of my sponsored product campaign budgets in auto and broad match campaigns and every time I mention this it usually throws people off . You're like that's absurd , that's got to be a waste . I'm here to tell you I get better results on broad and auto than I do on exact . Now , exact are super important .

Exact can be very crucial for SEO purposes . Exact can be very important for defensive purposes and even offensive in some cases . But broad , match and auto campaigns just simply have a lower bid . So I want my dollar to go farther .

But you know that's not going to grow your brand per se , but it's going to prevent your competitors from stealing some of your customers , and so it's a defensive play . Most people gain customers today through non-branded keywords . That's where most of your effort and time needs to be spent . But I'll even run defensive ASIN campaigns

. So if we look at a detail page , there's lots of there's , like you know , I counted them up one time there were 997 ads , clickable ads on my own detail page . That's a lot of ads , right , like too many DM ads , period first of all , and second of all , like on my own website I only have one ad , my product .

But on Amazon there's rabbit holes everywhere isn't there , and so sometimes it makes sense to advertise on your own detail page to prevent that . Or at least , even if they don't click on the defensive ads , they see your at your product class or everywhere . It just reinforces how important your brand is and they're making the right decision , so it's like a lot .

And so they have a receipt printer and they're like the number one receipt printer and it's like more of a B2B product , it's point of sale , but it's very popular and I was trying to . First of all they were just a mess because they had no Amazon strategy , but I was trying to show them .

If you type in Epson receipt printer , there may be a page beyond the first page , Like they're the brand and there's brands you've never heard of , like you mentioned before all going to school on their brand and it's because people are looking for Epson in that case , because it's kind of a standard in the industry .

So I do think you need to do some defensive . So I'm glad you agree . It makes me feel a little bit better .

The problem that I typically find , though , is that sponsored products will have a better return on ad spend on the average category product , by as much as five to eight times better . So it makes it difficult to want to go off of Amazon to advertise .

So I'd usually recommend this after a certain threshold , after your $2 million brand , after you see diminishing returns .

Because going from , let's say , your ACOS today is 35% and you're thinking about Google Ads , I'm telling you right now , there's no way Google Ads is going to beat a 35% ACOS , especially since you can't track it , you can't optimize it , it's all a guessing game .

So because of that , until your ACOS is tapped out at 50% let's say like 50% is like oh my gosh , I can't go a percentage point over that At that point would I try Google Ads , tiktok , influencers and UGC content totally different framework for that Highly recommend it .

When I started doing UGC on TikTok for Age of Sage , I tripled doing ugc on tick tock for age of sage . I tripled my brand searches on the amazon platform . I got a lot of great engagement pennies on the dollar for for clicks and all that good stuff . Um , I am a fan of running ads on as many platforms as possible if you have an omni channel brand .

But , to be clear facebook , google and all of these different platforms right now it's just incredibly difficult to optimize and to track results into Amazon . And there's obviously tools that do this and some of them do them pretty well . It's just not as good of a return and it's harder to track , harder to manage .

So that's why I usually say you got to be at a certain threshold before you tap into external traffic strategies .

Just got lucky on the UGC selection and so those videos will get thousands of plays on TikTok and just incredible results and it's very low cost . It's not gonna work in every category , to be clear . If you're selling a B2B product , TikTok is definitely not gonna help you , but we're seeing a lot of people that are .

We're in this TikTok nation right now where we're looking , everybody's looking down at their phone and their products and there's just some leverage to be had here Anytime you have a new- .

I'm not going to use it because I don't want to shop from the Chinese directly and wait two weeks for an item , especially since it's subsidized by both the US and the Chinese government . You can mail something from China to the United States and Oklahoma City cheaper than you could from .

They're so scared of the Chinese a la Timu and TikTok that they turn their last enemy , shopify , into their best friend . Now Shopify and Amazon are linked up . Facebook and Amazon are linked up . Pinterest and Amazon are linked up , so we're seeing a lot of changes in behavior . Your enemy of my enemy is my friend , I guess , or something like that .

But having said that , if I was a brand looking for the two or three action items to go chase today , I would defend main image to hell and back and I would talk about the customer avatar and getting all these elements right on Amazon . But let's assume for a moment that my Amazon page is perfect and my diminishing returns on sponsored brands .

I've hit my threshold and I've already hired consultants and I've hired agencies and I just I'm plateaued . At that point I would say go do TikTok shop , go spend money on Google ads , go do these other crazy external traffic things , because you'll find some growth there , there's no question , new customers await you , but make sure you're dialed on Amazon first .

And I'm like they never introduced me by Stephen Polk , they don't care who I am or what my name is , they just say talk to my Amazon Guy , he will help you on Amazon . And so that's how I made the company name and I think that there's just a really big impact that Amazon is . It's half the economy .

Realistically , amazon is the behemoth , it's the 800-pound gorilla . So if you're not on Amazon , you're irrelevant . First of all , nike is even coming back to Amazon after a beating . They shrunk the company because they left Amazon . That's how powerful Amazon is .

That's not going to happen , though . Nobody has the infrastructure the logistics .

When I say that , people like get a little eyebrow raise sometimes . But like seriously , Walmart's not a marketplace . Why ? Because they cheat . They put the retail products above your product .

You'll never , ever hear about a native-born Walmart brand , but 95% of the brands that I work with I have 400 brands that pay me every single month right now Only 5% of them are omni-channel , 95% of them were on amazon . I've never met a walmart native-born brand .

Even today , though , we're seeing the ability to launch a new product and make millions of dollars . It's very possible . Now a lot of people do it the wrong way . There's probably thousands of sellers that are going to try and fail , because the gold rush does not reward effort , it rewards results .

If you go out and buy a plot of land in them hills back in the gold rush day in California , you might have had a chance of success , but not a guaranteed one . So , just like selling on Amazon , it's a legitimate business . You have to put in massive amounts of effort .

Usually , you need three things to run a business finance , marketing and operations and you have to have an A in one of those three and at least a C or better in the other two , and most often than not the brands that I work with they're usually really good at the manufacturing or operations piece and not so good at either finance or marketing piece and not

so good at either finance or marketing , and so , if that describes you , you'd be obviously a great candidate to work with a marketing agency like MAG . But if you don't have some success in at least one of those three categories , you're going to go out of business within the first 12 months . So , yes , I think Amazon's worth doing today .

I'm obviously biased to say that , but I firmly believe it . I don't think it's passive income . I want to set expectations , but there's no question Amazon . You see 50,000 new accounts opened up every single month . There's a reason it still works .

That's why I do what I do , that's why I share all my trade secrets . I want to bring prosperity to the entire world . So and this is how I believe that's possible .